Nov. 28, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:26:00
3139 Will a Resource Based Economy Work? - Call In Show - November 25th, 2015
[0:00] - A Personal Message From Stefan Molyneux[6:01] - Call In Show IntroductionQuestion 1: [7:32] - In your libertarian view, are you satisfied that even with removal of state control, billions of other people will still suffer at the hands of the market system - a system which is itself an indirect form of control, and which, in an unprecedented age of technology, is already technologically redundant?Question 2: [1:24:35] - I have lived with and worked with various agencies and groups helping refugees here in the United States for multiple years. Is it refugee preferences or politics that is guiding placement? What would you say is the best way for people to help refugees? Should individuals and families sponsor refugees to come here?Question 3: [2:28:54] - How come every time people start building societies from scratch, the big and successful ones always end up with a government that holds monopoly on violence? In other words, what if the only way we can organize large groups of people (in a stable way) is to install a central government with all the taxes, laws and police?
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyne from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
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Do you ever have this thought or this idea?
Wouldn't it be great if, within a few minutes of starting a conversation with the listener, Stefan made him so upset that he actually swore at Steph?
Well, if you've ever been curious what that's like, we have a show for you tonight.
First of all, we're talking with a fellow who thinks that we should have no money.
I don't know if you throw people in jail for using money or you just encourage people.
We never quite got to that.
But we got to a whole bunch of other stuff that I think you'll find very interesting.
And then we talked to a man who has spent a lot of time overseas working with the kind of refugees that we've been talking about recently in this show.
Those who are heading to Europe and to North America.
Some stuff he agrees with and some stuff he doesn't agree with that we talked about.
But it's always great to get the empirical view on the ground.
So we had a nice long chat with him.
And the last caller was a Russian.
And...
To be honest, he seemed to be a little bit nostalgic for communism and had certain criticisms of voluntary free-market anarchic solutions, which we went into in some significant detail.
It ended up, again, getting a little testy.
Maybe I'd had, you know, 18 to 20 too many coffees.
Hard to tell, but it was a very interesting conversation, nonetheless.
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Let's dive straight in.
Alright, well up first today is Colin.
Colin wrote in and said, That's from Colin.
That's what we call begging the question.
How you doing, Colin?
That's what we call an incredibly long question actually.
Michael put me under a little bit of pressure to come up with a question so it's a little bit of a mouthful but I'm sure you're well able to digest it.
How are you Stephen?
I'm well.
How are you doing man?
I'm very good.
It's great to be able to talk to you.
Obviously I've seen many of your videos and I really, really applaud your efforts and the way you're changing people's minds and things.
I think it's fantastic.
So well done on that score.
Thank you.
All right.
So what is a market system?
What do you mean by that?
Because that's a facet that shines a different rainbow light on every different brain, it seems.
So tell me what you mean by a market system.
Okay.
Well, really, what I'm talking about is actually the money and the trading system that we use.
I know you're a fan of deregulating and leaving a hands-off market system, but I'm actually talking about...
Fan is an annoying and manipulative way to put it, just so you know.
Pardon?
Say that again, please?
Well, just saying I'm a fan of something is kind of an annoying and manipulative way to put it, because I've either made a good case for it or I haven't, but saying I'm a fan...
It implies that it's some emotional prejudice on my part, like Apple versus Windows or something like that.
I just really wanted to point that out.
If we can keep the digs to a minimum, I think we'll have a much more fun conversation.
Okay, sure, absolutely.
Sorry for that.
Anyway, so really getting back to my point, the markets and the trading system that we use obviously is based on money.
It's based on exchange, exchanging like for like.
I'm pretty much advocating that this system is now redundant, that we don't actually need to exchange things anymore because technically we can create abundance.
Sorry to interrupt, but we have to sort of take this step by step, otherwise it's going to be a mishmash.
So are you saying that the market system is where people can voluntarily trade things And they can certainly trade goods for goods.
They can use barter and all of that in a market system.
It's just that some people choose to use money.
Obviously, most people choose to use money.
So help me understand what is...
Because when you say a system, it sounds like something sort of designed or created or something which we're a piece of machinery in.
And in a free market system, then people can choose to give things away for free, which is, of course, what most parents do with their children.
In fact, what all parents do with their children, at least when their children are young.
They can choose to give things away.
They can choose to trade labor for labor.
They can choose to trade good for good.
Or they can choose to use money.
Or they can choose to use no money.
I mean, there's nothing that imposes the necessity of using money in a free market system other than the fact that the vast majority of people find it extremely convenient.
So I'm trying to understand what it is that you mean by a system when people are free to use any medium of exchange or no medium of exchange that they want.
Okay, well, in defining a system we're talking about something which has created itself and the system has evolved of itself and that was originally predicated on scarcity in maybe a more primitive times.
Where it was difficult to find things and it was difficult to make things and obviously we invented an exchange paradigm for want of a better word.
I'm really advocating that this whole notion of exchange is actually technically redundant because the scarcity that it actually was originally predicated on actually no longer technically exists.
We've always seen the rise and rise of automation and mechanization over the last couple of hundred years.
And we see that more and more what is actually happening with this automation is that it is really just benefiting a smaller and smaller few as the money is funneled upwards, so to speak.
So really what's actually happening is that the automation and mechanization that's supposed to actually liberate Humanity, I suppose, is actually almost doing the reverse.
It's actually benefiting a small few and leaving the rest marginalized.
Well, in terms of the actual market system itself, I'm really referring to the whole paradigm of exchange.
I believe that the notion of exchange is actually something that's no longer necessary.
At least certainly for basic goods and commodities and the basic necessities of life.
We can argue maybe about whether trading is good for luxury items or not necessary items, but certainly for the basic ingredients of living a good life.
I think that this is all perfectly possible without using any medium of exchange whatsoever.
Alright, I'm not sure.
Was that your speech?
Was that a statement?
There was no question in that.
And no further explication of what I asked for.
Okay.
Well, what you asked for is what I'm describing as a market system.
As explained to you, the market system is a system that has evolved itself, originally predicated on the notion of exchange...
No, no, no, please don't.
Don't repeat yourself as if...
First of all, you're historically incorrect insofar as that the market system was not around when things were the most scarce, right?
Like in a hunter-gatherer system, there was no free market system in the way that we would understand it.
Today, with sort of private property rights and a stock market and the accumulation of capital that is necessary for the kind of investments that improve worker productivity, the creation of Steam engines and lathes and the internal combustion engine and the robotics and automation and so on.
So if you think that the free market system evolved out of scarcity, you'd be incorrect because for the 99.999% of human history, scarcity has been the norm, like grinding god-awful scarcity.
But the free market system has really only emerged out of the last, maybe you could say, 200 years.
And as the market system emerged, it tended to eliminate the bottlenecks of Scarcity that characterized almost all of human history.
So the idea that the market system evolved out of scarcity or that the market system is there because there is scarcity, I don't understand how that explains the vast majority of human history where there was no market system and there was incredible scarcity.
But I'm happy to be corrected, of course.
Well, what I actually meant was, and what I said, was that the market system evolved out of the exchange paradigm, which is based on scarcity.
So first you have scarcity, then you have exchange, and then evolving from that, then you have this gargantuan money exchange machine, which is what we have today.
I'm sorry, you're adding just words.
I don't know what it means.
You say there's a money exchange machine.
Now, if you're talking about what we have today, what we have today is not a free market system because the government, of course, controls the vast majority of the economy.
It controls the very foundation of trade, which is the government run monetary system, the central banking monetary system.
So I'm not sure if you're talking about The vestiges of the free market that are currently...
Let me finish.
The vestiges of the free market that are currently being ground into powder under the weight of this fascistic central banking god-awful central planning slash socialist system that we have at the moment.
Or if you're talking about...
Like if you're talking about what we have now, then we're not talking about the free market.
And I'm obviously very critical of that as well.
If you're talking about the free market as a sort of theory and what may have been more prevalent in the past...
Say 50 or 100 years, then I just need to know what it is that we're talking about.
Are we talking about the current system or are we talking about the free market system as a theory or as a concept?
Yeah, okay.
Well, I'm talking about both.
I mean, if you want to make...
No, no, no, no.
Sorry.
You can't use the same word to describe a voluntary exchange of value, right, and private property rights.
You can't use the same word to describe that and Coercive, central planning by governments.
That's like saying that the free market and communism are exactly the same thing, and I'm going to refer to them both in exactly the same way.
That is like a doctor saying that health and illness are exactly the same thing.
The conversation becomes incomprehensible then.
So I just need to know which one you're referring to.
Okay.
Well, if you want to actually just hear me out when I'm speaking, that would help.
Certainly what I'm intending to say The difference between a market system and between a free market system, what I'm actually proposing is something that renders both of those ideas, whatever is current today and whatever exists in theory, both are technically redundant because we don't actually need to exchange anything in order to actually provide everyone with the basic necessities of life.
Okay, so you're not going to answer the question as to which you're referring to because you believe that both central planning and a free market system are both You keep using the phrase technically redundant, and I don't think that actually adds anything to the statement, but you believe that they both can be superseded by a non-trade-based environment.
So you're putting them both in the same...
I just want to be clear.
I'm not criticizing.
I just want to be clear that you're referring to anything where either private money or Bitcoin or government fiat currency or any sort of currency or any sort of exchange-based trade is Equally bad.
You don't sort of see any difference whether it's the government that's controlling and organizing around at the point of a gun or whether it spontaneously emerges from people's voluntary choices in a free trade environment.
Ah, right.
Okay, no, I absolutely agree with you that the free market in theory with the hands-off approach is certainly better than the monster that we have today.
So let's start there.
Certainly I agree with that and I agree with your points on that.
However, I am also saying that if you want to talk about freeing up the market, then we should really be talking about going one step further and actually freeing humanity from the actual scarcity-based paradigm, which is actually artificially imposed.
Now, what I would like to suggest is if some of your listeners, I don't know, are familiar with something like the ideas of resource-based economy, or if they've looked up the Free World Charter or the Venus Project, We have stepped in the theory once or twice, and I had a debate with Peter Joseph, which we can link to below if people want to.
So I've certainly been exposed to the ideas in the past, but just before we go charging on, you brought up something which, again, I'm sort of trying to understand, that scarcity is not a fact of life, but scarcity, you feel, is somehow imposed by a system.
Certainly in the current system, absolutely.
Scarcity is artificially imposed.
I mean, we could have factories producing...
Sorry?
Sorry to interrupt, but I'm really trying to understand where you're coming from, and you keep sort of charging on to the next thing, which is...
I'm sorry I have to keep interrupting you, but I just need to understand where you're coming from.
So are you saying that all scarcity is artificial?
No, of course not.
I'm saying that much of the scarcity that we experience is artificially imposed by default in the fact that the market system obfuscates people from actually getting the things that they need.
I don't know what obfuscates means there.
Do you mean that there's a wall between it?
I'm trying to understand So, let's first try and figure out what scarcity is artificial and what scarcity.
Let me finish my question.
Let's try and figure out first, if you say there is some aspects of life where there is scarcity and there are other aspects of life where the scarcity is artificial, then which aspects of life fall under scarcity, the scarcity reality or paradigm, and which aspects of life is the scarcity artificial?
Okay, right.
You're being very over-semantic here, really.
I'd rather actually get on with some more interesting points, but really, okay.
No, no, no.
Hey, hey, hey, hey.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
No, you aren't waiting for me, so why don't you let me finish?
Can you let me finish, please?
No, I will not let you finish, because if I ask you a question, and then you say, well, Steph, you're being over-semantic.
You say that there's a division in life.
You say there's scarcity.
I say, well, is it all scarcity?
You say, well, some scarcity and some not.
I ask you which is which, and then you accuse me of being over-semantic?
That's kind of a dick move, don't you think?
I'm asking you to This is a philosophy show, man, which means that we have to know what we're talking about.
And my audience has to know what you're talking about.
We can't just charge on to our manifestos.
We actually have to define things as we move forward so everybody has some idea what's actually being talked about.
Absolutely, and it would really help if you're going to let me finish my sentences.
Otherwise, there's not much point in me even wasting my time here, Stefan, to be honest with you.
Are you accusing me of being rude when you say that I'm being over semantic?
Now you're doing it again.
Excuse me, you're fucking doing it again.
Can you let me finish, please?
Okay?
Go for it.
Seriously.
Fuck's sake, man.
Okay, right.
You want to talk about the difference between the scarcity that's existing in nature and that is physical in nature?
Yes, of course it exists.
There is artificial scarcity imposed on us by the market system.
For example, I don't know, there's plenty of water in the world, but we've got to pay for our water.
So this is kind of preventing people from accessing water that they need.
Okay, in theory, maybe that's not a great example.
We could use other things like basic foodstuffs, which are in plentiful supply and which will get thrown away day after day in...
Landfill because people don't have the funds to buy these and it doesn't get to the proper distribution point.
So really you can say that if people, the artificial scarcity I'm talking about is that if people don't have the money to buy the thing that they need, then that is a form of scarcity, even though the actual thing that they need is clearly abundant.
You understand?
Okay, so you brought up food, but you dropped it, right?
Because I think only 1% of the water on the planet is fresh water and water is...
Sorry, you brought up water and we dismissed that.
So you're saying that there are some people who buy food and throw it away because they never end up eating it.
And there are other people who don't have food, even though they're hungry.
And that's an example of scarcity, is that right?
Yes, absolutely.
It's artificially imposed scarcity because The money or the market or the exchange system, whatever you care to call it, is actually an obfuscation to them from obtaining that which they need.
Okay, you understand?
It's okay if you have the money to get us, then it's not a problem.
If you don't have the money, it's a problem.
Therefore, it is like, we could call it reverse scarcity or something like that.
So the thing that you need is there, but you can't get it because somebody is telling you you can't have it.
Wait, wait, wait, hang on, sorry.
Somebody's telling you you can't have it.
Okay, let me just, I'm trying to really wrap my head around this and appreciate your patience with this.
Okay, so let's say I live in England and I want a banana.
And let's say there's a guy in Tahiti.
I don't know if you grow bananas in Tahiti.
Oh no, South America.
There's a guy in Argentina.
And he's got, he picked a bunch of bananas, but his bananas are turning brown.
Because he just never got around to eating them or whatever, right?
And so I am in England and I want a banana, but the bananas are currently in Argentina.
Now clearly the amount of energy and cost it will take to ship me just those bananas and the time it would take to get them before they browned off to the point where you couldn't eat them.
Is that an example of what it is that you mean?
Well, no, I suppose you could strictly say that that is a physical barrier between one person getting the banana.
That's a long distance away, I suppose.
But then if you...
Okay, that's kind of a bit of a confusing example because on the one hand, okay, we obviously have the technology and the expertise to transport that banana from Argentina to UK. So I suppose you can argue that it's technically possible.
Yeah, of course it is, yes.
Let me just make sure I understand.
So, Argentina has an excess of bananas relative to its needs, otherwise they'd never be able to export any.
And England has a deficiency of bananas because it's too cold to grow bananas there.
And we assume that England has an excess of, I don't know, oatmeal or whatever it is that England exports to Argentina.
I know with Germany, it's Nazis.
But with England, let's just say it's oatmeal.
So, of course, in the free market idea, let me go with an example that I'm a little bit more familiar with.
I think Bastiat talks about or Locke.
Anyway, so there's England and there's Portugal.
So England is really good at producing wool because the climate there is good for sheep.
And Portugal is really good at producing wine because grapes grow well in the Portuguese climate.
Now, Portugal can also grow sheep.
You can raise sheep in Portugal and make the wool, but generally it's more efficient for England to grow No, to raise the sheep and to make the wool and then trade it with Portugal for wine because it's easier to...
Well, you can grow wine in Portugal.
You can't grow it in England.
You can raise sheep in both places, but it'll be easier and cheaper for you to raise the sheep in England.
So there's an example of sort of what's called differential advantage, or there's a number of different technical terms for it.
But there's an example of how...
A particular location will only be good at growing one thing or maybe only best at growing one thing.
And another location is better at growing another thing.
And then they trade for sort of mutual advantage.
Now, that would not be scarcity.
That trade actually brings abundance because it brings wine from Portugal to England, which England otherwise wouldn't get because it wouldn't be able to grow the grapes to grow the wine.
And then what it does is it brings better or cheaper or higher quality wool from England to Portugal in exchange for the wine.
You know, whether it's using the medium of money or not, it's not particularly important.
So in that situation of trade, it would seem to me that abundance or more variety flows into both countries through the medium of trade.
But is that not how it would work in the way that you would view it?
Absolutely.
And one of the problems that I find with Discussing things with people like yourself or people who are advocates of the free markets is that they expound economic theories which are some things that kind of sound okay on paper but they actually almost have no relevance to the real world if you don't mind me saying so.
Are you saying that you can't buy Portuguese wine in England?
At the moment?
Hang on, let me have a look on a website in England and see if we can get ourselves some Portuguese wine.
Let me just look it up.
Sorry, can I stop wasting time here and let's just try and listen to my sentence.
It'll be really useful.
But my point, Stefan, is in your little microcosm example there of exchanging wool for wine, okay?
Let's just assume for the sake of this conversation that there's only wool and wine in the world, okay?
And let's just say, let's work on that because we're talking about a theory here, okay?
We're not talking about it in practice.
What I'm saying is that theory there is always going to be predicated on whether there's going to be sufficient demand for wine or there's going to be sufficient supply, there's going to be sufficient demand for wool, etc., and whether the value is like-for-like value and can Portugal get enough wool for the amount of wine that it's prepared to send to England.
What I mean is that all these things, the sort of exchange theories that most people use to defend the market system are really nothing more than middle-class theories which actually have almost no relevance to the real world and people who are living in abject poverty, the people who can't access the basic goods that they need to survive and to live a good life.
And it's not good enough as far as I'm concerned just to blame governments or corporations and saying that we've just got bad people there, we've got to get rid of these people, or we've got to completely go anarcho-capitalism because you're still not removing the obstacle to what people need, which is the whole notion of exchange itself.
The fact that if I don't have something to give you, And you have something that I need that I can't get this thing from you because I can't give you anything.
This notion basically...
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
I don't mean to interrupt you, but if you're going to just filibuster, I have no choice.
Are you saying that there's no way to get something from me if you don't have something to trade?
Absolutely, yes, of course.
Of course, and that is the tragedy of the system.
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Let's have a conversation, don't just speech, okay?
So, are you saying that...
You said at the beginning of the conversation that you have listened to a lot of my shows.
And did I charge you for that?
No.
Did I charge you to listen to them?
Sorry, so there you received a lot of value from me.
Without having to pay.
Okay, yeah, sure.
That's good.
My daughter receives value from me without having to pay.
I give a fairly substantial amount of money to charity and, you know, have conversations with people without charging them a penny.
I've never charged anyone for a conversation in the entire history of this show.
And so the idea that you can't get value in a sort of free market environment without having something to trade Would kind of be counteracted by the conversation that you're having at the moment and the shows that you've consumed through this medium.
Would that be fair?
Yes, but I mean, we're not talking about conversations here.
We're talking about food.
We're talking about basic necessities of life, of living, that almost like several billion people in the world are having difficulty accessing to.
And applying the sort of Neat little middle-class economic theories, saying the world will be right if we just do this, this, this.
It's not cutting it, I'm afraid, for the majority of people in this world.
What is a middle-class economic theory?
You keep using that phrase.
I have no idea what that means.
Okay, because, yeah.
Okay, well, time and time again, I run a group called the Free World Charter.
Okay, maybe you've heard of it.
But obviously I run into debates with people because I'm advocating a moneyless society and people obviously have got lots to say about that, as you can imagine.
And of course one of the things that people say is, well, yes, like what you would say, that all we have to do is remove the obstacles to a fair exchange system.
And that if I have something to offer you and you have something to offer me, then we both exchange and we both receive something of more value than we had previously.
Yeah, this is the theory.
This is how it goes.
But it does not take account of the people who don't have something to offer in return for something that they need.
For instance, I mean, how many, like...
Countless families living in poverty who almost have almost nothing to offer just to have just to get the food for themselves.
Okay, this is just a simple example, but also you can also apply this example up the entire scale of to middle class or society wherever where people don't have access to get the things that they really need to have a really good life.
Okay, okay, but Colin, Colin, hang on, hang on.
Are you a father by chance?
Okay.
Well, did your parents charge you rent and did they require labor from you when you were a little child growing up?
No, of course not.
Right.
So, human beings only exist Because there is charity called parenting in the world.
This is the only reason that you and I are having this conversation, is our parents gave us stuff for free when we were too young to earn it.
So this idea that somehow we have this giant machinery that catches everyone and it's all based upon not giving things to people for emotional reasons, there would be no human beings.
Because you'd look at that and you'd say, a baby...
I mean, unless I'm part of Parenthood, I don't know how I can make much money out of that.
A baby, what economic sense does that make?
They cost $100,000 or $200,000 to raise, and you can't guarantee they're going to give you a penny back.
They're a terrible investment.
So the only reason that human beings are alive is because human beings decide to give to others, namely their children and other people as well, As a result of charity, so I don't know how everything becomes part of a free market system when the only reason that there are people to inhabit that free market system is because of voluntary charity.
That's parenting, Stefan, okay?
It's not actually working in the labour market.
Obviously the parents, one or both of them, usually both of them in this system have to both go working eight and nine or ten hours a day and generally Miss out on all the key events of their child's development as a result.
So you could argue conversely that the actual market system is actually robbing the parents of their right to be with their children, which is really what most, certainly what mothers probably should be doing.
You know, it's better to be with their children.
Okay, so hang on a second, hang on a second.
So you can't just, Colin, if we're going to have a conversation, you can't just make points and keep moving.
Because it has to be a conversation.
Otherwise, you can just go filibuster and do your own podcast.
So if you're going to say that the free market system is robbing parents of their capacity to spend time with their children, then I think it would be a little tough to explain it historically.
So, for instance, in the post-Second World War period in America, let's say, for a lot of people in America, you could very easily raise three, four, five, or even six children On the salary of one person, of course, usually in this case, the man.
One person working.
And this is when there was far more free market than now.
Now, of course, what happened is women were lured by a bunch of socialist feminists.
They were lured into the marketplace and promised the endless rewards of being yelled at by people on a customer service line or something like that.
And they ended up being taxed and they ended up being able to tax the people who took care of their children.
And that's not a free market environment.
I mean, the amount of taxes that families are paying now, basically one person works just to pay the government, whereas before you could raise a family very, very well in a middle class income on one person's salary.
So if you're going to say, well, the free market robs Parents of their capacity to spend time with their children, it's a little hard to square with the fact that when there was much more free market, say 50 or 60 years ago, parents could spend a whole lot more time with their children.
Yeah, absolutely, sure.
Yeah, and I agree completely with the notion of what happened after World War II was obviously somebody had a brilliant idea to create this consumer culture and it's very successfully perpetuated to this day.
But yeah, okay, yeah, fair point.
Obviously, there was more time in a freer market system.
There is more time for parents.
But in general, the fact is that people have to, at least one of the partners has to actually be active in the labor market to provide all these lovely free goodies to baby and co.
So it's not actually charity in as much as Everything is for free.
It's because the child is getting those things for free because daddy has to go out and work for it and he has to pay for those things.
Rather, I would suggest, I mean, absolutely the idea of parenting and children getting things from the parents for free is absolutely correct.
Of course, it should be right.
But it should be wider.
It should be everywhere that the community provides for everybody.
And this is really, really easy if we just make a few small changes in our way of thinking.
And, of course, we all have to do it together.
It's not something that one little group of people can do.
It's something that we all have to simultaneously agree on.
If we...
Sorry, to interrupt.
The community should provide to everyone.
I'm not sure what that means.
Pardon?
I mean, so, for instance, I mean, in 2014, Americans gave over 350 billion dollars In charity, that's almost $3,000 for the average annual household contribution.
That's actually gone up 7% since 2013, and that's as a recession continues to sort of grind on and on.
But when you say, I just wanted to sort of point that out, that there is quite a lot of money floating around in the charitable area.
But when you say that the community should give everyone stuff for free, I'm just not sure what that means.
If you can help me understand.
Okay.
Well, let me start from the beginning, Stefan.
Maybe we've got to go off on the wrong foot.
Like I say, I have a group called the Free World Charter.
We have several thousands of signatures from all over the world, people who are agreeing with the idea of prioritizing community and nature more so than we do now, and removing the money slash market system from As being an obfuscation to the quality of human life and actually creating abundance for all.
But I thought that maybe some of your listeners may be interested in actually exploring some of those ideas because a free market capitalist system is for me, like, it's certainly better than what we have today.
But for me, it's not far enough.
As human beings, we're perfectly entitled to live a full and wholesome life on this planet, and everyone should be entitled to that.
And it only takes just a little, a small change in our daily attitudes and our daily routines to actually make that possible, I believe.
Colin, do you remember my question?
No.
Okay.
My question was that you said that the community should provide everything for free.
And I asked you what that meant.
Yes.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
Fair enough.
So, obviously, based on what I said there, then the idea is that if we're not using an exchange system, we're not using money, then all the communities provide for themselves freely.
And that's because we have...
I'm sorry, say again?
What do you think about that?
What do you think about having no money?
What do I think about having no money?
I think it would be a complete economic suicide.
I think it would strip nature of its precious resources.
I think that millions or billions of people would starve to death.
And I think we'd go back to the Stone Age as a civilization.
Other than that, I'm actually good with it.
Really?
Yeah, you'd think that would happen.
Why?
Why are you basing that idea, Tom?
Oh, gosh, where do we start?
Okay, so all human desires are infinite, in general, and all resources are finite.
Human desires are infinite.
Are your desires infinite?
Hang on, hang on, hang on.
Are you going to ask me a question?
Do you want me to give an answer?
We can go back and forth.
I thought you were asking me to explain.
Okay, well, if you want to go through one step at a time, but the human desires are interesting.
How many BIROS do you own?
How many what?
How many BIROS do you own?
Oh, BIROS, pens, like pens?
Yeah, Pam.
Let me put it to you this time.
I never quite have enough time in the day to get everything that I want to get done done.
I would love to live forever.
I'd love to live in perfect health.
I'd love to never age.
I would like wonderful things that would be great.
I'd like it if I could exercise in my sleep so that I didn't have to waste time during it.
I mean, I'd like it if I could see you in person rather than merely go over Skype.
I'd like it if we could have a holodeck.
I mean, all of these things.
When do we ever say, oh no, let's stop collecting computers because they're fast enough.
I'm sorry?
Why not?
Why don't you deserve these things?
Why don't everyone deserve access to all the best that humanity has to offer?
For fuck's sake, there's no one else telling us what to do on this planet.
We're all here, all together, doing this one thing, and we have a bunch of guys in one corner who are holding all the equipment and all the goodies and a bunch of starving people on the other side.
Colin, you asked me a question.
Would you like to give me room to answer it?
Okay, go ahead.
Okay, so the question is, why would it be a disaster?
Now, the question is, in the scarce resources that we have, how should we apply our scarce resources?
And the scarce resources, you could say they're oil, they're copper, they're whatever, it doesn't really matter.
Because the scarcest resource is life itself.
The fact that we're mortal, the fact that we can only be in one place at any given time, the fact that we can't do 10 things at once.
And so the fact is that we are mortal.
And the question is, how can we best apply our time to be of most service and value to humanity?
And the question is, how do we measure that?
So there's lots of things I could do with my day.
I could cut a rap album.
In fact, you can find some remixes of me on the web doing raps.
I could become a hairdresser.
I could try and become a tooth model.
There's so many different things that I could do.
And one of the things that, of course, I've tried to do is to figure out where I can be of most value to the world, given the scarce resource of time that I have.
And one of the ways that I can guide myself through that is to figure out how much can I get paid.
And again, we're talking about a free market environment.
Now, if I tried to do a podcast and I made one penny a year, Then that clearly would not be providing that much value to people as a whole.
If, on the other hand, I do a podcast and make $10 million a year or some crazy amount, right?
Then that clearly would be, especially if it was voluntary, if it was donation-based, but even if it was sort of advertising-based or whatever, that is an indication of how best to apply my resources because that's how much value I'm providing to other people.
So if somebody has a choice and says, well, I can be a hair cutter or I can be an architect, Well, being an architect is usually more challenging than being a haircutter, and there is a greater demand for the more limited skill sets of architecture than there is for haircutters, and therefore I'm more likely to get paid more by being an architect rather than a haircutter, which tells me that if I have the capacity, I should go be an architect rather than a haircutter because it has more value and more service and more positive effect in the world.
The exchange of money is merely a recognition of the value of your service to others, right?
You can't make money in a voluntary environment without actually providing service and value to other people.
You can go be a mugger or you can go be a politician, but you can be a really good mugger and be a politician.
But in a voluntary environment, the question is, okay, so you talked about biros or ballpoint pens earlier.
Okay, how many colors of ballpoint pens should there be?
I mean, it's crazy.
You know, I didn't know this stuff that much, I guess, when I was a kid.
But, you know, my daughter goes into a store and it's like apparently there's pens where you've got like eight different things you can push down to get different colors.
How many of those do we need?
Well, there's no central planner who can ever tell you that.
And you can go out and try and stimulate demand by creating advertising and so on.
But there has to be some sort of demand for people to even give you money to go and create advertising to go and try and create that demand.
You have to do the market research ahead of time.
And so in the incredibly complicated question of how are the finite resources from life to raw materials to talent to intelligence to ability, with all of the finite resources we have in the world at our disposal, how should they be utilized?
And the argument that comes out of the Austrian economists, out of Ludwig von Mises in particular, is to say that we solve this with the mechanism of price.
In other words, what people are willing to bid for is how valuable something is.
If you just ask someone how valuable something is, they'll say, oh yeah, you know, it's pretty valuable, whatever.
Like when Peter Schiff went to go and talk to the people coming out of Walmart.
And Peter Schiff said to people, do you think people in Walmart should be paid more?
And people are like, oh yeah.
And they said, okay, well how much would you be willing to add to your bill to cover that?
And they're like, oh, nothing.
Right?
So the way that you separate people's emotionally abstract preferences from From what they actually value in a tangible way, is you say, what value are you willing to part with in order to get this other value, right?
So the old example is that you have a, you Colin have a pen and I have a dollar.
And I'm willing to, we're both willing to exchange that.
What that means is that you value my dollar more than you value your pen, and I value your pen more than I value my dollar.
And this could be a pen and an orange.
It doesn't really matter.
And so price is a way of figuring out where the scarce resources in the world should go for maximum benefit to Society and that doesn't mean that everything has to be Yeah, no, I'm just explaining it to the people who from your side who you know end up listening to this and of course I've got a whole bunch of new listeners who need to hear this kind of stuff as well So the price mechanism Empirically measures how much value there is in a particular good or service or whatever or charitable donation, right?
Like if I'm a charity And I say, give me money and I will help so many people no longer be homeless.
And let's say you run a charity and let's say your charity is twice as good at it as my charity.
Well, then you can sort of put that in your flyers or you can put that in your mail outs or your emails or whatever.
And you can say, look, Steph's charity only helped 150 people become non-homeless.
They've only rescued 150.
I rescued 300 people with exactly the same amount of money.
So people will donate more to you rather than to me as they should because you are able to show a better return for their charitable dollar by helping more people which is the case we just made with the Syrian refugees that you can help 12 to 13 times with them if you send the money to the Middle East rather than if you bring the Syrian refugees or whoever over to Western countries.
So all of this is why without price and without supply and demand and without a free market environment to allocate resources Or to measure the actual value, the tangible value.
You know, my daughter says, I'd like to buy these crayons.
And I'm like, well, you have money, you can make that choice.
Now, she'd like to buy it if I pay for it, then absolutely she wants it.
Why not?
They're free crayons to her, right?
But if I say, well, it's your money, then it's like, ooh, okay, well, now I have to start limiting my resource consumption because I actually have to put money where my desire is and money Or the cost of acting on your desire is what limits the consumption of resources and make sure that waste stays at a minimum.
And if you take money and price and supply and demand out of the equation, then I think that human desires spread like a cancer and eat up the planet as a whole.
And that's the end of my filibuster and you can take it from here.
Okay.
Well, I'll just go through a couple of things here.
The reason I asked you how many byros you have was because you mentioned that people have infinite desires.
Obviously, I'm sure you don't have an infinite number of BIROS. In other words, you only have the amount of BIROS that you actually usefully need and no more.
So I think the idea of people have infinite wants is a little bit of a moot point there.
Sorry to interrupt, but that's because I want other things.
So I'm not going to buy infinite BIROS because that means I can't buy anything else because I spent all my money on BIROS. It doesn't mean that I don't have limitless desires if I don't have unlimited one thing because that would mean I don't get to satisfy my desire in other things.
Yeah, but if you had a billion dollars, you're not going to go out and spend a million dollars on virals, you know, because they're useless.
They're just in the way.
And this brings me to the point, actually, of human needs and wants, which is probably essential to a lot of what I'm saying here.
I mean, generally, the argument people say is that if you take away money from the world, then everyone's going to go crazy.
Like you said yourself, people are going to...
Strip the Earth there and they're going to just grab whatever they can, what they need.
Okay, this is...
I believe that is completely false.
And the reason for that is that if you expand that idea into the future, you'll see that this doesn't happen, that people will eventually behave only sensibly within what they can possibly handle.
For example, let me finish.
For example, if you say...
Say, from tomorrow onwards, all potatoes are free, right?
You never have to pay for potatoes again, okay?
What will happen is everyone's going to run out tomorrow and grab probably as many bags of potatoes as they possibly can, thinking that this is going to end.
But of course, if potatoes are free forever, then eventually people will learn that actually I only need to go and take the potatoes that I can carry and the potatoes that I can eat And other than that, it's a waste.
If anything else is just wasting us, you know, it's obvious.
So who wants to have like a room full of rotten potatoes when you can just go to the store and get fresh ones that you need every day?
So the idea of human needs being infinite in that one, it's kind of based on the oppressive nature of the exchange paradigm that we live in, that we think that all we need is just for money to be released or to have as much money And we're all going to go out and crazy buying things, you know, or going out and taking things.
But I believe that won't happen.
I believe that people will have access to more of the things that they need, absolutely, and we can produce these things more sustainably and more responsibly than we possibly can now because our entire ecosystem is being destroyed by, you know, Inferior production practices.
So we can develop the systems to actually produce the goods for everyone in a much more equitable and sustainable way and give everyone at least the basics that they need.
I mean, this is something that's so profound that we should be doing is that the fact that we're even arguing and saying that we shouldn't be doing that is, I don't know, it's like a slowest form of genocide.
It's like saying that there are people in the world who don't deserve what I have.
Wait, are you saying that I'm arguing for a genocidal position?
I'm not saying you personally, Stefan.
I'm saying that as we're strongly advocating, as people who are strongly advocating the exchange system, what they're actually doing is they're depriving other people through enforcing that exchange.
No, you use the word genocide.
You said the position that I was arguing for is a genocidal position.
Yeah, well, not you personally.
I'm talking about the idea of the exchange paradigm market system is predicated on basically, well, it's a predatorial system that we're predating on each other and people are suffering as a result.
And like billions of people are suffering as a result.
And I'm not just talking about people who are starving in the desert.
I'm talking about people who are suffering untold Financial stress.
And this is very, very real.
And it's all over the world.
I can feel it in almost every person I talk to.
I know plenty of people are well off, but unfortunately it's not the case for 90% of people.
A lot of people are struggling and the whole financial stress of living is actually killing people.
It's literally killing people.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean.
Life expectancy still continues to go up in the West.
What is killing people?
Well, life expectancy still continues to go up in the West.
I'm just not sure what you mean when you say it's killing people.
I'm talking about financial stress in the West.
I'm talking about this impacts on people's lives, on people's relationships on a daily basis and the effect is...
Oh, no, I agree with you there.
Yeah, no, I agree with you there.
I actually did a video a while back ago where I was talking about how one of the reasons I think people are getting obese in the West is because they're so stressed by a completely unsustainable and economically destructive system.
So yeah, I'm completely with you.
The system that we have right now is completely horrendous.
But let me jump back to something again.
So you say that when people have everything for free, at some point they will begin to limit I think we're good to go.
And, of course, that will create shortages, which then will have to produce more and consume more resources.
How long do you think that phase would last for people?
Because that seems to me kind of like, and this is not to compare the system you're talking about with communism, but with communism, there was like, okay, we need this all-powerful dictatorship of the proletariat.
But don't worry, after a while, the state will wither away and we'll have a free society.
It's like, actually, that magic bit in the middle sort of has...
Some concern for me, right?
Because I'm very interested in making sure that we have as many resources as possible available for future generations.
You know, we do borrow the earth from those who come after us, as I'm sure you would agree.
And so this bit where we make everything free and everybody consumes as much as humanly possible, how long...
Like, I'm trying to think.
So let's say I had a thousand Apple Watches.
And I went into a poor neighborhood, or any neighborhood for that matter, and I said, here, have a free Apple Watch to everyone.
How long would it take before I'd given out enough Apple Watches to satisfy the entire planet?
I gotta think that's billions of Apple Watches.
I can't think of many people who would say, no, I don't want an Apple, or whatever it is that people would like.
And so, how long would this phase of consuming as much as possible last, and what would the planet look like after that?
What you're talking about there is like a Black Friday situation.
The idea is that the mentality of that is coming from the mentality of Black Friday sales, where people are running out and trampling on each other.
The idea, for instance, if you take the example of the Apple Watch, Maybe it would be nice to have an Apple Watch, but who wants 20 Apple Watches?
Who wants 30 Apple Watches?
What's the point of having that?
It'd be nice to have one.
Maybe if it breaks, it'd be nice to get another one.
Okay?
But that's all you need.
So the point is that people behave reasonably and responsibly once you give them a chance.
And once they feel that there is enough I'm not necessarily talking about Apple watches here.
I'm talking about basic foodstuffs.
I'm talking about basic requirements, shelter, heat, energy, all these basic things.
Everyone in the planet should be fucking entitled to that.
Now, we've bloody earned this.
You know, we've been here long enough.
We're very, very smart.
We've been able to solve a huge amount of problems.
But here we are.
We're still, like, chucking at each other and pecking at the fucking place like hens.
And it's ridiculous.
We can all supply this thing to each other if we just have a little bit of understanding, a little bit of a better education about who we are, what the world is about, what our life is about.
It's not about fucking Black Friday or it's not about buying the LED TV. Life is about living.
It's about being happy.
It's about being with people.
It's about caring for other people and caring for the other creatures who live on this planet.
Stephen, is the important stuff.
The economic theory and all that stuff is just a game.
It's a sham.
It's a layer on top of our lives that we don't need anymore.
Well, actually, I completely disagree with you there, Colin.
In fact, I think that people like you who want to charge around organizing the world's resources, I don't exactly know how, if it's not going to be voluntary.
I assume it's going to be coercive.
I view you as extremely dangerous people.
Because I ask you clear questions, and I try to get clear answers, and I just get these emotional Hallmark cards, blarts of emotions, and it would be nice if, and we bloody well earned it, and we solved lots of problems, so let's all pull together.
This is all dangerous sloganeering.
The resources in the world need to be applied very intelligently to solve human problems.
And just you having a feeling that things are gonna work out, like I asked you a very clear question.
You said, look, people are gonna start to hoard and grab as many resources as they can as soon as they're free.
And I said, okay, well, that's pretty dangerous for the planet.
How long would that last?
And you go on this big long speech about how you'd like it if everyone had enough to eat.
Well, guess what, Colin?
Everyone would like it if people have enough to eat, but your feelings aren't going to be enough to do it.
You have to think things through.
You have to understand how things are going to work.
You tend to just get, you tell me to fuck off, or you tell people to fucking do this and fucking do that.
I mean, that's dangerous demagoguery.
You've got to actually know what you're talking about and how things are going to actually work.
Because if it's going to take 10 years for people to realize that they don't have to get everything that they want...
Well, there'll be no planet left after 10 years of producing a billion iPads and a billion Apple Watches and a billion four-bedroom houses.
There'll be no planet left.
We'll be living on the moon, less than the moon.
People will probably have eaten the moon, too, thinking it's cheese.
So I think that you do actually have to figure out what it is that's going on in your system.
And saying, well, you know, enough with this damn theory, enough with this middle class economics.
It's all just words.
No, these are important things.
It's like, to hell with double blind experiments.
Let's just, you know, squeeze some venom into people's mouths.
I'm sure it'll make them feel better.
I, of course, like you, want the world to be a happy and peaceful and productive place.
And the people who are starving to death are not exactly drowning in an excess of free market, right?
The people who are out there in Africa, the people who are out there in the Middle East, the people in Egypt who are trying to struggle buying $2 a day.
They're living in theocratic or oligarchical dictatorships where they don't have the choice to accumulate resources, where the governments are relentlessly corrupt, where corporations and foreign aid drown the entire environment in weaponry and destroy local agriculture by dumping food on their local markets and so on.
All of this is happening in the world.
And you need to know what theories and how these theories are actually going to play out.
Because whenever I try and press you on specifics, you kind of just go off on these speeches about how you want the world to be a better place.
Well, okay, let's just take that as a given that every decent person wants the world to be a better place.
But getting upset or avoiding answers or telling me to fuck off is not how you're going to get the world to be a better place.
And the last thing I'd say is we do have a test of what happens when people get infinite resources or at least everything's pretty much for free.
And there are two areas in that.
One, of course, is the corporate welfare state, which is where, you know, companies like Boeing and Intel get billions of dollars in government subsidies or the banks get huge amounts of government subsidies.
That's not good.
And I'm not saying you agree with that.
But on the other side, there's the welfare state.
Now, the welfare state gives people 50 or 60 or 70 thousand dollars worth of free stuff.
Now, throughout most of human history, this was completely incomprehensible and utterly impossible.
And so my concern is that when we look at, let's give people free stuff, we already have an example of that, and it's called the welfare state, where people get the kind of goods and resources and medical care and services and housing and everything that you could possibly imagine.
That would have been impossible to the very richest person not even 25 or 50 years ago.
They get free cell phones.
They get free access to computers.
They get free internet.
They get free phones.
Sorry, they get free televisions.
They get, like, The housing is taken care of.
And how is this free environment, this environment of free stuff, how is it working out for the work ethic of big corporations, well, very badly, and how is it working out for the work ethic and family structure of really poor people?
We are not a species, and I don't argue that, I don't think there's any species.
You can look at the mouse experiments, the mouse utopia experiments, more on this.
We are not a species that does well when limitations are removed.
We have evolved in situations of scarcity where we have to make rational choices about satisfying our demands, deferring our gratification, figuring out where we should apply our scarce resources.
And without the price signals to do that, it's all just going to be random or centrally coercive.
So this idea that somehow if everything becomes free, we have environments where we can see that working out.
And if you look at the inner cities, and if you look at what happens to government education, which is, quote, free for the vast majority of people in the poor communities who are going to it, who don't pay anything close to the taxes it takes to produce it, we do have a situation where people are getting a whole bunch of stuff for free, and it seems to be turning into a living, dantian, ninth level of hell right before our eyes.
So excuse me if I push back a little bit on some of this stuff.
But it seems to me like we have examples of the kind of free stuff that you're talking about, and it seems to be pretty god-awful.
Okay.
Sorry, you went on quite a long tour there, but I just wanted to say that I did actually answer the original question.
I wouldn't answer it specifically, but of course, because obviously we've never done this before, and everything hasn't been made free before, and certainly in the climate that we live in now.
Yes, it will take time probably for people to begin to behave responsibly, but of course people will behave responsibly when things become available freely to them.
It just becomes a matter of practicality.
What's the point of how do you know?
How do you know that's going to happen?
How do you know?
How do you know?
Because again, the welfare state is an example of people not acting.
When people have excess food, they tend to get fat.
When people have excess resources, they tend to get lazy.
They tend not to work.
So how do you know it's going to happen?
No, that's not...
But if you have things that are free within the current system that we have now, then it's like What's the best way to describe it?
It's like it's a gift.
It's a gift and you want to grab it as much as possible.
For instance, let's say they're giving away free TVs down the road.
People are going to run down and get loads of free TVs, for instance.
And the reason they're doing that is not because they're free, but because they cost money the rest of the time.
Do you understand the difference?
We have almost 60 years of the welfare state in America and That is not a short amount of time.
And the welfare state has destroyed, particularly in the black community, has destroyed the two-parent family, has destroyed work ethic, has destroyed and blighted entire communities.
You have thugs and drug users in these ghettos.
Not all, but a lot.
You've got black kids being born out of wedlock at a rate of 73%, whereas way back in the 20s it was like 20 or 30%.
All right, okay.
And so here we have 60 years.
You say, oh, well, you know, when people get enough free stuff, then they'll be fine and better.
Here we have a 60-year experiment where things still seem to be getting worse and not better.
That's because they're marginalized, they're socially marginalized people, and they're still living fairly close to the breadline.
So they're obviously not feeling very bloody good about themselves at the moment.
So you can't blame them for going out and drinking or maybe taking drugs or something like that to try and ease the pain.
You know, these are people who are in pain, Stefan.
I'm sure they don't want to be in that situation.
Of course, we have the issue of unemployment, which is creeping.
You know, we've seen what's happened in places like Detroit.
This is absolute...the heart has been completely gutted out of many communities because of that.
We've seen this happening in England as well.
And you do understand that they have almost infinitely more wealth Well, I'm sure they don't feel very wealthy.
I'm not talking about their feelings, Colin.
I'm talking about the empirical objective fact that they have $50,000 to $60,000 to $70,000 worth of benefits showered upon them Which is more money than almost every single slice and dice of human population anywhere across the world, any other time throughout history.
We've had a 60-year concentrated effort to shower untold wealth and human capital and intellectual capital and mechanical capital and housing capital.
We have had a concentrated monsoon of resources pouring onto a community.
And there's very strong arguments that it's worse off now than when we started.
So the idea that abundance is going to create virtue is not supported and is directly contradicted by this experience.
And it troubles me, Colin, that you just wave it away.
Well, they're unhappy.
They don't want to be doing it.
How do you know?
How do you know?
You just wave away these things which are significant arguments against your position as if they're just irrelevant or unimportant or you can just make up these magic spells called, well, they're just Unhappy and they're marginalized and blah, blah, blah.
Come on.
You understand this is a serious pushback on your position.
You might find a way around it, but you can't just wave it away.
You have to understand, Stefan, that there's a big difference between something being free today in our current market system and everything being free and everything being equal.
Let's call it a self-organizing society where everyone has open access to what they need.
When you have certain things free or certain people who are getting things for free in a market system, it creates friction, it creates tension between the attitudes I suppose for getting free things.
But when everything is free, when everything is just, is normally like that, people grow up in that system, they grow up in the world, they always know that food is always free, they always know that their house is free, that they're always going to have energy and free.
If this happens, I mean, fast forward for 5 years, 20 years, 50 years, okay, 100 years.
If people, if this is the norm, becomes the norm in society, Of course, people aren't going to abuse it because there's nothing to abuse.
Are you saying that the welfare state is not the norm?
Are you saying that 60 years of the welfare state is not the norm in the inner cities in America?
Of course not.
But the problem is not the welfare state.
The problem is all the crap that's around us.
Understand?
The crap that's creating...
All the crap that's around us?
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to understand about that.
That's not a statement that I have in Vietnam.
Yeah, the fact that these people were at one time expected to exchange their labor in order to give them food, basically, that now that they've been denied the access to that labor and then they're kind of saying, well, They're really like, they're sweeping, blush at the problem, sweeping money at the problem really just to try and make it go away.
But the problem is that these people are still there and they don't have They're marginalized.
Okay, fantastic.
So providing people additional resources does not solve social problems.
I think we're right back to where we started.
Because you're saying, well, if you give people additional resources, you'll be solving significant problems.
And now you're saying, well, okay, you've given a lot of trillions and trillions of dollars that have been poured into poor communities in America and through foreign aid around the world.
And it doesn't solve their problems because they're marginalized.
I didn't even know what that means in particular.
So yes, additional resources doesn't solve social problems and in fact can make them substantially worse.
And this is why my concern is that if you say, well, we can solve all social problems or human problems with more and more resources being fired at a particular group, yeah, now you're saying, okay, well, you can't solve certain social problems with additional resources.
I didn't say that, Stephen.
I'm sorry?
Sorry, I didn't say any of those things, actually, Seth, about hiring additional resources.
And also, I would also probably point out that probably a lot of the...
No, no, hang on.
You said if things are free, then people will get better and they will not abuse them.
And my point is that if we look at the welfare state, massive amounts of wealth are effectively free for people.
And over two or three generations, these communities have tended to get worse and more corrupt and more violent and more unstable families and so on.
And so if making things free makes people better, then that would be an example against it.
So what would you have these people who are in the welfare system, what would you have them do?
I mean, you think they're just lazy?
Well, see, I'm not a central planner.
I don't have to have them do anything.
What would I have you do with your day tomorrow?
Well, whatever you choose to do, you can have your day.
I mean, I'm not here to tell people what to do.
I'm not this giant chess player who moves resources and people around the world To make some utopia of my own imagination.
I would set them free, of course, right?
I mean, I would say, you are free to live in society, you're free to take charity, you're free to start businesses, rip down all the barriers that currently exist to these people, get rid of these god-awful government unions, educational systems, and give people the liberty and the freedom To build their own lives as they see fit.
To build their own communities as they see fit.
To help each other out as they see fit.
They can run their own lives.
I don't need to look at them as pawns on my chessboard of future utopianism.
All that needs to happen is the barriers to their productivity and their success and their achievements need to be ripped down.
So that we're not stuck in these tiny fences of over-regulation and these tiny fences of taxation and manipulation, corporate welfare and the military-industrial complex and the war on drugs and the prison-industrial complex.
Just set people free and let them do what they will.
What are these barriers to their own productivity?
What are you referring to there?
The barriers towards their own productivity?
A third of Americans need a goddamn license to have a job.
What the hell is up with that?
I mean, give them their own streets.
Give them their own schools back.
Let them own it.
Let them have it.
Let them keep it.
And let them live there as masters in their own domain rather than serfs of a welfare complex that exists to funnel taxpayers' money to bureaucrats rather than actually help the poor.
And if there are poor that need to be helped, and certainly there are, let people who are the most motivated and the most capable go in and help those.
Those are not welfare agencies where 70 to 80 percent of the money never even makes it to the poor.
Those aren't the government teachers who anytime you start to think about the kids might do better off if they don't have two and a half months off in the summer.
They go on strike and they start screaming blue murder as if you're taking away their kidney rather than just taking away an archaic requirement for an agricultural society that no longer exists for kids to work in the summers on the farms.
So just give the people back their own communities.
Just stop running and managing everything from on top.
With all the power of the state and all the uncaringness of the state and let the most motivated people who can make the most difference go into those communities and take down everything that stands between these people and what it is they could achieve with their life.
Okay, well you're completely ignoring the fact that obviously employment has pretty much, opportunities of employment have really rapidly decreased in the last 200 years.
How do you know?
What a presumptuous statement to say that I've completely ignored it.
I just did a debate with Paul Craig Roberts where we talked about systemic unemployment.
I've done shows with Peter Schiff where we talk about systemic unemployment.
It would be a lot more polite, Colin, if you asked me what I thought about that rather than assuming I've never even dealt with that topic.
But because you're a utopian central planner, you can tell me everything about what I think and never ask me a question.
Okay, I'll ask you a question then.
It'll make you happier.
What do you think then about if you're going to give all these people jobs, what on earth are they going to be doing?
Did you say I would give all these people jobs?
I said if you want to have all these people working who are in the welfare state, who you're criticizing so much even though you're not offering an alternative solution, What are you going to do with these people?
What are you going to have them doing?
Are they going to be all sweeping the streets?
See, again, because you're a monomaniacal central planner kind of personality, you think that I am the one who has to figure out what everyone is going to do with his or her life.
But because I'm actually interested in human liberty, I don't care what people do with their lives as far as I'm going to organize and tell everyone what to do with everything that they're...
Oh, you're going to be a street sweeper, and you're going to be a surgeon, and you're going to be an aircraft mechanic, and you're going to be a mime, right?
I don't...
I want people to be free and they can choose their own lives.
And this has been shown repeatedly that when you cut welfare, people just go out and get jobs.
And, of course, we need to have jobs be created in local communities and the best way to do that is to stop doing everything that made the jobs go overseas.
Stop printing so much money.
Stop allowing such a stranglehold of regulations where, you know, tens of thousands of regulations get created every couple of years, which further strangles the capacity for people to own businesses.
Stop with all this ridiculous licensing where you have to go and beg some bureaucrat for permission to put bread on your family's table.
Just get out of the way of people and they flourish.
It's sort of like saying, well, if you take this big giant ceiling over this garden, how are you going to make all the flowers grow?
It's like, it's not my job to make the flowers grow.
It's my job to get the stupid barriers between the flowers and the sunlight that they feed on and they grow of their own accord.
I don't need to be in there pushing and pulling and poking them.
Yeah, but you're not stressing the fact, Stefan, that the whole world has changed in the last 100-200 years.
It's the same thing that...
See, again, you're telling me what I do and don't stress and do and don't know.
You cannot get away from this idea that you know everything.
And you can tell everybody what they think and what they stress and what they don't.
me what I do and don't think about it and you certainly can't tell me that I'm not aware that the world has changed but you see you tell people what they think you tell people what their experiences this is why central planning is so tempting for you okay and so to be honest it's getting quite late here and I'm getting a bit tired so I'm probably not making the best sense at the moment but But really, let me just try and summarize my points for your listeners anyway.
The Free Will Charter is something that I'm advocating.
It might be loosely related to what people know as resource-based economy.
I believe, and plenty of others who are following what we're doing also believe that the world will be a better place if we actually remove the market system.
That pretty much it's technically redundant than the actual is possible to create abundance now.
And I do believe, yes, I can't prove it, but I do believe that people will behave responsibly once they actually are...
Accustomed to living in a paradigm which is abundant and people are cooperating and people helping each other in the community, I think it's absolutely possible.
I also think that the notion of the hands-off free market system It's certainly better than what we have now, but I believe that actually we should be looking to actually liberate the entire species instead of just liberating just one little operating section of it.
I believe we can do a lot better than what we're doing.
And Colin, I just wanted to point out that in a free market system, if you can find a way to produce things for free, You'll totally win, right?
Like if you can produce a Lamborghini for no resource consumption, whatever that means, right?
Everything's free, right?
The fact that resources are finite means that everything that you produce with those resources is something else you can't produce, so it's hard to imagine that things can be perfectly free.
But if you can produce a Lamborghini for $0, right?
There's two Lamborghini dealerships in a free market environment.
Number one, there's Steph's Lamborghini dealership where I sell them for $100,000 or whatever.
It's probably too little, but whatever it is.
In the free market, it's $1,000 for a Lamborghini once you get rid of regulations.
And so there's Steph's free market Lamborghini dealership.
And then there's Colin's Lamborghini dealership.
Now, I charge $1,000 because I... I'm into middle-class economics and apparently hate the poor, but you charge zero dollars because you found a way to produce Lamborghinis for no resource consumption and no reduction of limited resources whatsoever.
And so in a free market environment, I don't think there'll be a big lineup For my thousand dollar Lamborghinis when you're producing Lamborghinis for free.
So I don't think you need any other system in a free market system or even in the current system.
If you can produce Lamborghinis for free, then you can go and make those Lamborghinis for free and you can go and get them in the free market and you'll put the existing Lamborghini and frankly all car dealerships out of business.
And you'll end up ruling the market.
And then you'll end up being able to produce more and more things for free and free potatoes and all these things.
So I don't know why you're waiting for anything.
Just go and do it and take over and displace anything that has a price on it.
It's already happening.
It's already happening.
What you're talking about, okay, we can't make the Lamborghinis for free yet, but this is already happening.
You look up Jeremy Rifkin, look up zero marginal cost economy.
This is already happening.
It's getting so much easier.
Well, then why are you talking about wanting to displace the free market when you can just go and produce this stuff for free?
Why do you need to be an activist?
Just go make stuff for free.
Like the guys who came up with cell phones didn't need to call into shows like this and say, "Well, you know, rotary dial phones and landlines and phones with cords that are attached that you've got to dick, dick, dick all the way around.
They're redundant and they're technologically obsolete." What they did was they went out and made way better phones and they didn't need to go and lecture people and say, "Well, we've got to get rid of the whole rotary dial paradigm.
Just make shit that's way better and don't worry about activism." Like, why would you bother having a website and trying to get signatures?
Like, the people who made really great new phones, they don't need, like, the old phones that were the size of the Kleenex box that just pointed a satellite and you couldn't be under a tree and stuff.
Those guys didn't set up websites.
The guys who made better new phones, they didn't set up websites.
And they didn't say, well, we've got to get all these signatures because they're these really crappy old phones and we've got all these great new phones.
All they did was make great new phones and displace all the old phones.
I don't know why you'd bother being an activist and trying to lecture people about how the world should be.
Just go and make the stuff that's so great and displace everyone who's already there.
Yeah, I'm not saying that's the way it is now, Stefan.
I'm saying that's the way it is going.
You know yourself how much cheaper it is to buy, like, incredibly, like, your phone or whatever is incredibly complicated and...
Incredible a device it is, and now you can pick them up for less than $100.
The point is that the costs of everything are coming down anyway, so this is the way it's going, right?
Okay, then I'm going to have to look, man.
If this is inevitable, there's not much point for it.
You know, the sun's going to rise tomorrow.
We don't need a philosophy show about that.
But I really appreciate your call, and thanks for staying up so late.
Let's move on to the next call.
If this is going to be inevitable, then there's no point in having a debate about it.
But thanks a lot for your call, man.
I appreciate it.
No problem, Stefan.
Okay, have a good evening.
Good luck.
Bye-bye.
All right.
Mike, who's next?
All right.
Well, up next is Austin.
Austin sent me an email and has some direct experience working with refugees.
I thought it'd be very interesting if he were to come on and give his thoughts on what we've got right, what we've got wrong, and just relay any other personal anecdotes, which could be useful when people think about the entire refugee crisis.
So, welcome to the show, Austin.
How you doing?
Good.
How are you?
I'm well, thanks.
Right.
So, helping refugees.
Tell me, give me the big background.
Where are they?
How have you been helping them?
And how's it been going?
Yeah.
So, I wrote to Michael saying, you know, some suggestions maybe for the show.
And then you guys actually put out a show just as I was emailing him about basically what I was suggesting to do.
So, yeah.
Also, I wanted to say thank you.
I really enjoyed your show.
Thank you.
So I've been sort of involved with refugees for most of my life, kind of, I mean, in that I've lived around refugees most of my life.
I've done a lot of volunteer work and other work.
And then I lived in a refugee camp last year in Thailand, in Burma, Thai-Burma border.
And, yeah, so, I mean, most of my experience with refugees is I was telling Michael is anecdotal, but sort of confirmed lots of what you put out in your recent video about Syrian refugees.
The situation in Burma, it's a little bit older, but similar situation to Syria, a civil war that's been going on.
So, civil war, you know, same thing, displacement.
Yeah, I've been involved with lots of the refugees here in the States as well as in the refugee camps.
Okay, dude, I appreciate the call.
You've got to start getting to the meat of the matter.
I mean, reading your resume is going to put my audience to sleep.
Okay, so give me sort of how it's the same as what I've described or maybe how it's different.
I just wanted to get a few questions from you.
I have a few questions for you.
In the video, you talk about the vetting process and the difficulty of bringing refugees here, which I agree with.
The vetting process is...
I saw What I saw is a lot of refugees, quote-unquote refugees, that would use the system to come to America, you know, for free, basically.
Sure.
I mean, I don't think it's super common, but I personally knew quite a few.
And people that had their sort of refugee papers sold...
So, yeah.
You mean they were, sorry, they would get refugee papers and they would sell them to other people?
Right.
So, like, in Burma, the situation was they started sending people to America.
And as soon as that happened, all of a sudden, you know, you had this huge influx into the refugee camps of quote-unquote refugees that weren't really refugees.
I mean, so inside the refugee camp, you had a lot of people who were...
There were lots of refugees with really horrible experiences.
I feel like they've been through just horrific things.
When people started getting resettled to America and to Australia and other places in the West, there was a ton of people who had Thai papers, who had Burmese papers, who weren't real refugees, had never been in sort of any sort of conflict, all of a sudden appear in the refugee camp and got refugee papers and got resettled.
Also, I have a friend who his brother was about to be resettled, and his papers was sold by a camp leader to another person, some other Muslim guy, and he came over instead of him.
So his brother stuck over in Thailand, he never came over, while some other random person went in instead.
Right.
Let me just give a little speech here, because I think this is important and relevant.
So the vetting process is nonsense.
Like some reporter just went through the federal immigration database There's not a full list of any kind, but from 2003 to 2013, federal authorities deported over a thousand refugees, including 89 just from Georgia.
In those numbers, 713 refugees got kicked out of the U.S. for committing aggravated felonies, including dozens of assaults, sex crimes, drug crimes, and homicides.
So there's already a vetting process.
It's not perfect.
And so that...
The FBI director has said it's impossible to vet these refugees, but let's look at a bigger picture in history that people don't get.
I don't mean you, I just mean people as a whole really don't understand this.
If you look at scams in the United States, white-collar scams, outside of the banking system, which is not a scam because it's legal, it's immoral, and that's a whole other story, but if you just look at things like Scamming Medicaid, scanning welfare, scanning Medicare, all of this stuff.
It generally is not Europeans who are doing it.
A lot of Russians doing it.
A lot of Middle Easterners, some from Pakistan and so on.
But if you look at the names of the people who scam the government, a lot of times, in some cases, the significant majority of times, it's not Western Europeans.
It's not guys from Scandinavia don't come over and try and scam Medicaid for Five million dollars, there's ten to be people from Russia or other countries.
Now, is this because Russians are inherently bad?
It is, in fact, no, I'm just kidding.
It is because, no, it is because this is the Western European experience and people, you need to understand this.
You really need to understand this.
Number one, the Western system of government has been enlarged for the domestic population about the best For at least a couple of hundred years.
And I mean that very seriously.
The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the parliamentary democracy, the respect for property rights, the respect for contracts, the lack of corruption in Western European governments.
Until quite recently, the lack of corruption was extraordinary throughout human history.
You know, President Obama says, oh, you know, the Paris attacks, they're an attack on the values we all share across humanity.
No, they're not.
No, they're not.
Innocent until proven guilty.
The Fifth Amendment, the Second Amendment, freedom of speech, separation of church and state, respect for private property rights, a relative uncorruptibility in the civil service.
Very rare.
I mean, you need to get anything done in India, you've got to bribe five bureaucrats before you even get out of bed.
It's really, I wouldn't even know how to bribe a bureaucrat in the West.
I don't even know how it happens.
So this is one of the six billion reasons why some cultures are not compatible with Western standards.
So in the West, because the government has been relatively restrained, because the government has been relatively honorable, because the government has been relatively uncorrupt, A respect for civic institutions has arisen.
That did not arise in Russia, right?
I mean, for obvious reasons.
You had the Tsar, What was that old Woody Allen joke that the revolution occurred because people realized that the TS Tsar and the CZ Tsar were actually the same person.
That's it.
We're having a revolution.
Right.
So you had these god-awful serfdom.
You had Ivan the Terrible and Vlad the Impaler.
I don't know if he was Transylvania or something.
Catherine the Great.
You had the Romanovs.
I mean, just brutal, you know, the usual assortment of warlords and tyrants.
And then you had Vladimir Lenin and Trotsky and all these sociopaths and Stalin.
This is not a culture that has grown up with a great respect for social institutions, let's say.
Right?
So it's the old joke in Russia, they said, well, and the Soviets, they said, well, they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.
It's all a game.
If you could rip off the government for something, fine, because the government has no respect for you.
You have no respect for the government.
It's a predator-prey relationship.
Maybe you can turn the tables at some point and scam them and whatever, right?
Like if you work in some socialist vodka bottling factory and you can sneak some home, you'll do it.
I don't think that happens a lot at Smirnoff in America or whatever, right?
And so these cultures that have grown up where the people have no respect for their governing institutions, no respect whatsoever.
I remember when I was many, many years ago, in my early 20s, I went with a couple of friends to Mexico for a vacation.
And I was being shown around the ruins in Chichen Itza by this guide, and we fell to talking about government, as I am wont to do.
And he was just giving me this long speech about the government.
They're just a bunch of bandits.
They're just a bunch of thieves.
They're just a bunch of extortionists, no respect for them, right?
Now, if this guy could, I mean, if he could have cheated on his taxes, I'm sure he would have.
If something fell off a government truck, he wouldn't be like, excuse me, I think you dropped this.
Oh, sorry, it's you, Mr.
Drug Warlord.
Here's your headless corpse back or whatever.
He wouldn't be returning stuff.
Because they have no positive respect or relationship to their government.
Now, in the West, for a couple of hundred years, governments were kind of out of step with most of the god-awful dictatorships in human history.
And so, when you bring a bunch of Russians in...
To America, they sit there and they say, oh, are you kidding me?
I can set this little scam up and I can get millions of dollars from the government?
Because in Russia, they would have done exactly that.
But they come to America and they don't have that same respect and the idea that the government is there to help you or protect you or protect your rights.
I know people find this odd coming from me, but compared to Soviet Russia, where we live now is a paradise of statescraftmanship, whatever the hell that means.
So, when you bring a bunch of Pakistanis in, a lot of them are great people, nice people, and bring a bunch of Mexicans in, they have a different relationship with their state.
Do you think that the Syrians' experience of their government is the same as somebody who's waving their fourth of July fly?
What the hell was that sentence?
The 4th of July flag?
Do you think that they hang something out there and they respect the veterans and they cry at the Star-Spangled Banner?
That the genuine, heartfelt middle America flyover country patriotism that warms the hearts, and not unjustly so, of a lot of Americans and the patriotism that is there in England and so on.
Among the British people, the native British people, that has arisen out of hundreds of years, and in England you could really argue more than hundreds of years since the Magna Carta and so on, of the government becoming a progressively more beneficial institution to society.
And that which benefits you, you don't wake up in the morning trying to figure out how you can rip it off as much as humanly possible.
Whereas if you grew up in a Soviet system where the government was ripping you off and threatening you every day, yeah, okay, it's war against war.
This is not your marriage partner.
This is some bully, and if you can trip them up and not get noticed, you're going to.
They have a fundamentally different relationship.
That's number one.
Number two is that there are in-group preferences.
It is harder...
To rip off your neighbor than it is to rip off a stranger on the other side of the world.
Now, we are a tribal species.
This is what everybody needs to wake up in the morning.
This is your morning mantra.
I'm good enough.
I'm smart enough.
And gosh darn it, people just like me.
And we're a tribal species.
And we're a tribal species.
So if you're in Russia, and if you're a Russian and you come over, or you're a Mexican and you come over, you are not going to have the same loyalties to the Caucasians who built the country you're moving into.
It's just because we're a tribal species.
So you have an in-group preference.
And any tribe that did not have an in-group preference never made it through the evolutionary shredder.
Just doesn't work out that way.
It's like anybody who doesn't have a preference for their own children over other people's children.
Those genes simply don't last.
They don't get kept along.
Because there's always some hungry child out there relative to yours.
So...
When you bring other cultures in, you bring all of their in-group preferences and you bring all of their willingness to rip off out-groups and you bring in all of their historically suspicious and hostile relationship with their own government that immediately gets transferred to the new government.
And that is a recipe For a lot of chaos, it's a recipe for a lot of exploitation, and it's a recipe for a lot of scams, which is what you see when you start looking through a lot of these Medicaid scams and so on.
You're going to see a lot of skis and not a lot of Jones.
So I just sort of wanted to mention that and get your thoughts on that with your experience with the refugees.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think I, I mean, often I didn't really appreciate or recognize sort of the difference in cultures from, until I spent some time overseas and I was in public school and we were given this idea that we're all the same, we're all equal.
There's good people everywhere and I definitely experienced that, amazing people that had been through some horrible things, but there is a difference in culture that I think often we don't understand.
And there's a ferocious in-group preference!
I mean, I saw this guy, Jorge Ramos, I think his name is, and he was talking about how the Latinos, you know, in America, like nobody can get to the White House without the Latino vote.
And there's so many tens of thousands of Latinos turning 18.
Every single, you've got to go court the Latino vote.
You've got to go and appeal to Latinos and you've got to go and get the Latino vote.
Otherwise, you can't get to the White House.
Well, what is he saying other than there's a big blob called Latinos who have pretty similar interests you've got to appeal to?
Well, then, and those interests are not the same as white people.
But don't ever think negatively of the Latino group.
It's like, what?
If they have a giant group of preferences that are common to most of them, and those preferences are at odds with white people's preferences, of course the white people are going to think negatively of them.
Because their preferences are opposite.
If the Latinos get what they want, the white people don't get what they want and vice versa.
So how?
Oh, you've got to respect other people's culture.
We're multicultural or equal.
But boy, those Latinos are going to shaft you politically if they get the chance.
What's the guy's openly saying?
And then people are like, well, wait a minute.
How could you possibly have any hostility to the Latinos who are going to vote in a big block to screw up your interests?
Of course they are.
Anyway.
Yeah.
Well, so, yeah.
And then it's like, well, what do you mean white people?
You're concerned with immigrants from different cultures.
You just told us they're going to vote collectively against the interests.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
I mean, I think it definitely is sort of culture dependent.
I mean, some cultures can match, but some, you know, it's more difficult.
Oh, no, no, no.
White people in America have tried this deal for the last 60 years, and the deal is something like this.
Okay, everyone on the planet, we white people are going to pretend that we have no particular collective interest.
We're not going to organize.
We're not going to try and defend our culture.
We're just going to bring everyone in, and we're going to give you a whole bunch of great stuff.
We're going to give you affirmative action.
We're going to give you disproportionate high levels of welfare relative to the white population.
We're going to look the other way when you get these beat-up white people games or Or when crime among certain minority communities is extraordinarily high.
We are going to just unilaterally disarm as a culture.
It's all...
We have no interest.
We're not going to defend anything.
Our culture is really...
We're going to spit on our own culture.
We're going to spit on your own history.
And yeah, go ahead.
Have a couple of knockout games.
We won't notice.
We won't mention anything or anything like that.
So white people have tried this experiment, which says, okay, if we put down...
Our cultural preferences, our collective self-interest as Caucasians, what's everyone else going to do?
And I think it's worked about as well as being in a prize fight with Muhammad Ali and getting all pacifist on his highly motivated and moving butt, right?
Which is that we say, okay, well, we're going to put aside all of our history, all of our preferences.
We're not going to have any form of white collectivism.
It's immediately going to be called racism and white supremacism and white nationalism and evil and Nazi and blah...
So we're going to put it all aside and we're going to put aside every single one of our collective interests and all of our cultural history.
We give you all of the advantages.
Not only are we not going to have any advantages, but you get all the advantages.
You get affirmative action and all this is government spending and you pay far less taxes and white people pay far more taxes and blah, blah, blah.
There's been this big giant experiment for the last 60 years, basically whipped along by the left, but this has been the experiment.
And I think it's, you know...
Not unreasonable, as I was speaking to the first caller, to look at this 60-year experiment and say, okay, how's that working out?
How's that working out for white countries?
Well, not well.
Frankly, massive debts.
A lot of it is driven by minority welfare consumption.
And, of course, you know, don't get me started on the corporate welfare and so on, which is not exactly a minority problem for the most part.
But, yeah, it's not working out that well.
White people are looking to become minorities in their own countries with groups that have very strong in-group preferences that regularly put down white people or attack white people or say that white people, white culture, white societies are terrible and horrible and racist and And you've got white privilege and give me more money and you people are bastards and we hate you all.
And it's like, you know, I think it's okay to say, okay, we tried putting down our own particular...
I say I, it's not my particular thing, but I'm just sort of speaking collectively.
We disarmed.
We put down any collective benefit for ourselves.
And boy, if you think that when Mexicans become a majority...
In America that there's going to be a lot of affirmative action hiring for white people, I think you might be mistaken.
So I just think it's time to sort of say, okay, well, how's this experiment of white people not having any particular in-group preference or any particular cultural preference?
How's it working out?
I don't know the answers to all of this.
I'm just saying...
Let's review and see, because it seems like this kind of forelock tucking and prostrating ourselves or collectively before other cultures and other groups, I think it's not good for anyone.
I think it's really not.
It's like being the yes man to an abusive partner.
I mean, it's just toxic for everyone.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think the...
I mean...
If you look at, well, so that's the other thing I wanted to sort of bring up with you.
And like, I mean, everybody thinks that we're doing the refugees a favor by sort of bringing them here, at least lots of the media seems to assume that.
And I don't think, so I mean, from my experience with refugees here, it's not like all great for them once they get here in that, I mean, I know multiple refugees who sort of regret that they came here and wish I mean,
they were living in a place where they were surrounded by people that were, you know, similar culture, similar language, and they come here, especially, I mean, and the people I worked with were mostly Christian, which made it a lot easier once they came here,
but the, I mean, so if you don't even have that, it'd be even harder, but like, I especially worked with a lot of sort of teenagers that came here Between, you know, if you come here between 14 and you have to go to public school and you don't speak the language, you know, going to public school and you do speak the language is hard enough.
And the ones going to public school, they don't speak the language, they don't speak English, they're just completely out of place.
I mean, so that's, I mean, you see a lot amount of drug abuse and other problems.
But, I mean, I don't, I mean, what do you expect when we're putting I'm sorry to interrupt, but I think the fundamental issue is that if you would easily integrate into a white society, you wouldn't need to leave your own society because it would be as good as a white society.
If you could just immediately flow into some...
And again, some people do, and they do really well.
But the reason you're leaving is your society sucks.
And of course, there's been bombing, which is not inconsiderable and so on, right?
But your society sucks.
And so...
If you could come and integrate and be perfectly comfortable with a really free and liberal society relative to these hellhole theocracies in the Middle East, right?
Then your societies in the Middle East wouldn't be hellhole theocracies.
So on average, there are IQ differences between the two populations and so on.
It just doesn't work that well.
And and so the reason I think what happens is everybody looks at Western societies and they see Manhattan and they see cruise liners and they see Restaurants with you know wonderful food and they see High-powered executives in great suits and they you know they maybe they consume a lot of it through the media I don't know like media in other countries and so on and they come and they say well,
I want that I really really want that and then they come over and And it doesn't happen for them.
And it's sort of like if I hung around a bunch of Calvin Klein models, you know what I mean?
And they'd be like, I'm watching them and they're like, wow.
I'm like, holy crap, is it ever easy to pick up women.
I mean, those guys, holy crap, snap their fingers, lift their shirt, you know, Jersey Shore style.
And they just, women will, you know, they can go up and talk to women and all that kind of stuff.
And then, so I'm like, okay, well, so if I go and hang around with these guys, I'm going to pick up lots of women.
And, you know...
Let's say I'm now 49 years old and these guys are like 22, right?
And they do like three hours of sit-ups a day and don't drink water so they don't...
So I'm looking at these guys roaming around saying, wow, women, you can pick them up like that and whatever, right?
And I go hang around with them and I'm like, oh, right?
It's really not working.
It's really, really not working.
And that I think is one of the big problems.
People look at the West and say...
Well, for white people with an average IQ of 100 in societies that were kind of built by white Western Europeans, okay, the white Western Europeans do really well.
But if other people come in, I think they don't get the same stuff that they've been seeing.
And I think what brings them over is kind of a mirage.
That they can just step into it and have it, and then they come here and they don't get it.
And then they're not happy.
And then they're like, okay, well, if I can't adapt to this new culture, then I'm going to turn this new culture into my culture.
And that's where you get these no-go zones and everybody's facing inwards and it becomes insular because like, okay, well, I can't make it out there, but I can turn out there into where I came from and that at least I'm comfortable with.
Yeah.
I mean, I think I could, at least from what I've seen, I mean, there's like a spectrum.
I mean, there's a small group that They'll adapt and they'll be fine and they'll succeed.
You're always going to have that group, but you're also going to have a big portion that is going to have difficulty and serious difficulty.
Anybody would if you go to a place, different culture, different religion, different language, you're not going to instantly be able to adjust.
And there are no women!
Almost three quarters in some areas, almost three quarters of the immigrants are men.
And of course, over 40% of them are young men.
That's terrible.
It's baffling.
I mean...
Well, it's not baffling if it's an invasion.
It's baffling if you're looking at it as anything other than what it is.
Yeah.
Because there's two things that civilize young men.
Number one is getting married and number two is having children.
And if young men don't have the opportunity to get married and have children...
It's a problem.
Then their adrenaline is going to...
Sorry, their testosterone is going to stay very high and their frustration and sexual frustration and anger.
Huge hordes of unmarried young men are the death knell of every civilization throughout history.
I mean, you've got to...
And this is, you know, the MGTOW movement and so on.
I'm not criticizing and just pointing it out that these are people who don't have any investment in the continued success of that society.
And, you know, I... I could be wrong.
I can't imagine that there are a lot of, I don't know, blonde cheerleaders in Texas who say, I really hope that that swarthy Syrian boy who can't speak English really asks me to the prom.
Like, I'm sorry to be so frank, but I just, I can't see how that's...
I mean, there's not nearly enough women in the immigrant population to marry after the men, and I can't imagine that they're going to get into a lot of whole other areas where they're going to get a lot of dates and a lot of settling down with these people.
Why would you want to marry someone from a completely different culture, from a completely antithetical in some ways religion, antithetical political experience, antithetical upbringing as children, in that it's a very heavy religious upbringing in the Middle East compared to what goes on And you can't speak the same language.
Like, this is not going to work out in terms of getting these guys married up.
What is the sexual market value of a Syrian refugee outside of that population?
That's humiliating.
So you get young men, unmarried, frustrated, can't get a job, facing huge challenges adjusting to some kind of new society, who deep down know that they have an extremely low sexual market value.
That pisses Young men off enormously.
Like the humiliation of frustration and growing anger and resentment that comes out of bringing a whole bunch of men in who have really a negative sexual market value when it comes to the general population as a whole.
Dear God.
I mean, it's a powder keg.
I mean, you're just loading the barge up with more gel ignites and jumping up and down on it.
Nitro.
Nitroglycerin, that's what I'm thinking of.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I didn't have...
My experience hasn't been that just because I haven't...
I've seen those numbers, but with the Syrian, it's inevitable.
Especially when they come in that age group of early teens through their 20s and you can't communicate.
It would just be hell.
That's not going to be a ...
I've seen with lots of kids I know that have come when they were in their teens, not able to speak the language and they have a really rough time.
I had a few more questions for you on the refugee situation.
Why do you think there's not more pressure on Arab countries to resettle them, which seems so logical and obvious to have them resettle in Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates?
Why do I think there's not more pressure?
Yeah, I mean, it seems like the political pressure to have...
I mean, nobody seems to put pressure on them to accept them while we just keep accepting them here in the West.
Well, okay, first of all, I mean, Turkey's taking in almost 2 million refugees.
Lebanon, more than 1.1 million.
Jordan, 629,000.
Egypt, 130,000.
Iraq, which we all know the status of Iraq, almost a quarter million refugees.
So, they're not necessarily integrating into those societies, but they have taken refugees and they're in camps to a large degree and so on.
So, I think it's not true to say that.
But here's the thing.
All it is is sentimental vote buying.
By the politicians.
It's got nothing to do with what is good for the country.
It's got nothing to do with what is good for the refugees.
What's by far the best thing for the refugees is to send money over there to help them.
Because for a thousand dollars, you can resettle a refugee over there, but it costs almost $13,000 to do it in the West, even in the short run.
So you can help millions Of people over there, or you can help 35,000 families over here.
So there's nothing to do, like nobody's sitting down and saying, okay, let's put the sentimentality aside, let's put the, you know, let's figure out how to actually help people with facts and data.
And so all it is is that the politicians don't want to say, we don't want Syrian refugees.
And why don't they want to say that?
Well, because there's a lot of Muslims in America, right?
America has taken in more immigrants over the last decade or so than the rest of the world combined, and almost half of those have been Muslims.
So are you going to say, well, we don't want these Syrian refugees.
We don't want them to come here.
Well, how's that going to be interpreted?
It's going to be interpreted as racist and the media is going to have a field day with you and you're going to get protests and you're going to get people burning signs on your campaign lawn.
You know, why?
I mean, you're not paying for it.
And so you get to buy votes.
You get to be sentimentally appealing to a lot of unthinking mouth breathers who are like, oh, good, we're helping them.
That's great.
Otherwise, they'd be dying.
And so don't you care about these people and so on?
And so I it's all of this is just vote buying.
I mean, it's like saying, why is there a government debt?
Well, because it's a lot easier to print money than it is to raise taxes.
And it's a lot easier to borrow money than it is to cut spending or raise taxes.
So it's just the logic of the system.
Sentimental people who don't know how to think, who are just looking at pictures of sad-eyed refugees and saying, let's give them a home.
And, you know, it's just a conquering of Idiots by sentimentality, which tragically seems to be the general history of civilization as a whole.
But, and nobody is, you know, I mean myself and other people as well, of course, are standing up and trying to push back, but, you know, we don't have any political power, thank God.
So, why is it happening?
Because, well, because women as a whole.
Because of sentimentality, right?
Because women are all like, let's give them a home, you know, they're homeless, they're refugees, we care, and, you know, women...
I have to go fight in wars in general and they're not going to be called on to fight if there are any problems.
And at some point, you know, if there's a big attack and a lot of women get hit, then women will start to act.
But, you know, it's just it's just sentimental stuff.
And a lot of it comes from women, not all of it, but a lot of it.
And and of course, remember, we've done this whole R versus K selection thing that ours cannot process threats.
And there is this sentimentality of, you know, we're all just kind of the same.
But of course, if the reality is we're all the same, then why the fuck would they be coming here?
It's like saying, ah, all McDonald's are the same.
There's a McDonald's at the end of my street, but instead, I'm going to drive to the McDonald's three and a half thousand miles away.
But they're all exactly the same.
It's like, which is it?
If people are all the same, then they shouldn't need to come here.
They have to be coming here because the way of life in the West is better.
So then it can't all be that everyone's the same because the societies built by white Western Europeans are better, which is why people want to come to those countries.
So this idea that everything's all the same, well, that's just used to shut Western Europeans up, right?
And so it's just sentimentality and vote buying and the usual lefty, goopy nonsense, which doesn't even hang together on its own merits.
But, you know, these lessons just need to be learned again and again throughout history and...
You know, people won't listen to reason.
They listen to sentimentality because we've had a couple of generations of largely, I mean, who is responsible for the emotional life of Western countries as women?
Women have been disproportionately raising children because there's so many single moms and even when there's not single moms, there's women who've got the primary custody of children.
Almost all of the educators that little boys and little girls experience up until probably at least The ages of 12 or so are almost exclusively women.
It's like 97-98% in the primary grades of teachers are women in a lot of the places.
And so, of course, women have a tendency to think, quote, think more emotionally than men do.
I think studies have borne this out pretty repeatedly.
And that makes perfect sense evolutionarily because women were a tribe who raised their children, so feelings were more important than other things.
And so you've got a whole generation of people who've been raised by women who think emotionally and this is why, you know, emotional arguments like slavery and Jim Crow and so on just excuse everything and they just think emotionally.
Which is not thinking, right?
The feels.
The feels.
Thanks, ladies, for the feels, right?
And so you get these...
Swings, right?
And now we're in this hyper-emotional, unreasoning, offended, rape room.
Sorry, let me start that again.
Mike, please edit that.
We're now in this whole pendulum swing, which is, I think, starting this, I talked about with Bill Whittle, is starting to sort of swing back.
There's this whole pendulum swing where we're in this touchy-feely, I'm offended, I'm upset, I don't want to be triggered, there are microaggressions, I'm feeling bad, and so on.
Because, of course, men have a tendency to cater to the emotional preferences, let's say, of women for obvious evolutionary reasons.
So we're just at that swing, and we're making all these bad decisions as a culture, and it's going to swing back.
And unfortunately, when it swings back, there's a lot of suffering, but what can you say?
You know, if you're the doctor and you tell the guy to quit smoking, quit smoking, quit smoking, sooner or later he's gonna quit smoking.
It's just gonna be probably uglier than he wants it to be if he didn't listen to beforehand.
Right.
I mean, I can understand the sort of desire to help the refugees.
I mean, I obviously have had that desire.
I mean, that's why I went over there and...
I don't know, stop bombing!
To help the refugees, we just need to stop doing stuff.
Stop invading Muslim countries.
Stop bombing Muslim countries.
Stop setting up no-fly zones.
Stop doing all of this goddamn stuff that destroys Muslim countries.
Stop selling goddamn weapons to Muslim countries.
I think that'd be great.
You know, I mean, as I pointed out in the presentation with regards to France, France has very strict gun control, except for the United Arab Emirates, which they'll sell every human shredding device known to mankind.
So, Mike, if you can grab me up, I had this somewhere, I don't have it here, a list of the countries that have been invaded, Muslim countries that have been invaded by Western countries.
And we've got a whole thing coming up about the Crusades.
We're going to have a balanced thing, but...
I mean, this idea that one government program just leads to another government program.
So we had one government program called, hey, let's arm the Middle East.
We had another program called, hey, I know what, let's bring peace and stability to the Middle East.
And now we have another government program called, hey, let's bring in all of the refugees from the previous failed government programs and put them on another failed government program called welfare.
And it's like, holy crap, like, can we just stop?
Helping people, for God's sakes, let's stop helping people.
The idea that now we've got to run over and help these people from all of the prior interventions is insane.
Syria is at least the 14th country in the Islamic world the U.S. forces have invaded or occupied or bombed and in which American soldiers have been killed.
The 14th country in the Islamic world just since 1980.
All right, let's tick them off, shall we?
Iran, 1980.
1987 to 1988.
Libya, 1981, 1986, 1989, 2011.
Lebanon, 1983.
Kuwait, 1991.
Iraq, 1991 to 2011.
Oh, and 2014 as well.
Somalia, 1992 to 1993.
2007 to infinity.
Bosnia, 1995.
Saudi Arabia, 1991 and 1996.
Afghanistan, 1998 and 2001 to infinity.
Sudan, 1998.
Kosovo, 1999.
Yemen, 2000.
2002 till infinity.
Pakistan, 2004.
And now Syria.
Woo!
That's a lot of dead Muslims.
But you know what, folks?
They just hate you for your freedom.
So I think let's stop getting involved in these damn countries and then we won't have any refugees to take.
Yeah.
I mean...
Yeah, and I mean almost all conflicts around the world, the US somehow gets involved and creates...
Somehow!
Somehow!
Well, the US military-industrial complex needs perpetual war in order to remain profitable.
This is what happens when you turn your national defense over to the government, which was not always the case throughout human history.
US military-industrial complex is Requires a state of perpetual war, which is why one conflict gets replaced with another conflict gets replaced with another conflict.
Back in 1917, Woodrow Wilson took the U.S. into World War I with the promise that World War I was going to be the war to make the world safe a democracy.
And this was the war that was going to end war.
And America has this habit of fostering these relationships with its supposed allies, and then blowing those allies up, and then making friends with whoever rushes in to fill the power vacuum, blowing those people up, making friends with whoever comes into that power vacuum,
blowing them up, rinse and repeat, and every single time the people who rush into that power vacuum had more traumatized childhoods, more destroyed childhoods, more brutalized childhoods, have seen more people dead, Which is why Saddam Hussein was bad And then the people who rushed in to replace Saddam Hussein was bad and then the ISIS is even worse and they get worse and worse and worse because you're layering childhood trauma on childhood trauma on childhood trauma in these countries,
which is why the brutality tends to escalate.
But, of course, the United States of amnesia, as it's been called by Gore Vidal, Putin just recently called out Obama and the U.S. for creating ISIS. They were originally allies in the war against Al-Qaeda and against the Syrian dictator.
Oh, Gaddafi, he's our ally.
Oh, he's our enemy.
I mean, it's insane.
It is the mafia, you know?
It's like in Goodfellas.
When Robert De Niro is looking across at Joe Pesci, he's been friends with the guy for 10 years.
He's like, oh, I know how I'm going to kill him.
No loyalty.
It's purely R, right?
It used to be K. You've got K military run by R leadership.
Do you remember...
Nobody remembers.
Nobody remembers.
We live in this insane now.
It's like there's this video game and people just see one frame and think it's a portrait.
And then suddenly things jerk to something else and then it's something else and there's no memory of what came before.
We're living in this 1984 universe.
The war in Iraq was supposed to cost only 50 to 100 million dollars.
It was only supposed to take a couple of months.
It was going to bring peace, stability, and democracy to the Middle East.
And Americans were going to be welcomed with flowers and open arms.
Just like the welfare state was supposed to eliminate poverty.
And there's no memory.
It's too god-awful for people to remember the promises that were made versus the results that were achieved.
Because then they realize the degree to which nobody has any intention of delivering what they promise.
The United States government had zero intention of delivering peace to the Middle East.
They lied to people and they lie every single time.
All governments do this all the time.
They say, one more blood sacrifice and we will give you perpetual peace.
Just give us one more child to stuff into the wood chipper of the military industrial complex and in that blur of blood and bone, that geyser of destruction...
After that, the blood will water the ground and the flowers of peace will flow.
One more sacrifice.
One more war.
One more invasion.
Boy, the moment we overturn this government, the moment we replace the democratically elected government of Nicaragua or Iraq or Iran.
Forget Iraq.
Iran.
The moment that we replace this government with a government more friendly to our interests, that's when we get peace and stability in the Middle East.
And it's like you've got...
I hate to cheapen the analogy of it.
I'm just trying to bring it down to a level that people can really get emotionally.
It's like you've got some...
Like your brother.
Oh man, I love you, man.
I want to start this landscaping business.
I need like $2,500.
I'm going to buy a truck and I'm going to quit the weed.
I'm going to go and I'm going to...
Just give me the money, man, and I promise I'll pay you back, like double, like six months.
It's all I need.
I'm going to finally get something done with my life because, you know, you really inspire me.
I admire you.
You've done a great thing with your life.
I'm going to move out of mom's basement.
I'm going to stop playing Dungeons& Dragons by propping up the tables on the couches, and I'm going to just go out there.
I'm going to start my life, man.
It's time for me, and I'm sorry about how much time I've wasted.
I'm sorry about how much Mass life course for you in the past.
This is it, man.
$2,500 is all I need, and I'm going to keep you updated with what I'm doing, and I'm going to let you see what I'm buying, and it's all that, right?
And you give him the $2,500.
A month or two goes by, he's like, man, you know, weirdest thing happened.
Like, my truck needed a new carburetor, so just like, I just need two grand, man, two grand, and I'll be able to, you know, things are coming along well, I'm getting some business, and he, you know, he keeps, and I won't belabor the point, but the guy keeps coming back.
Now, it's painful for you at some point to say, he's never going to have a landscaping business.
He's never going to pay me this money back.
He's been lying to me the whole time.
He's a deadbeat, parasitical leech, and all I'm doing is enabling him.
I am toxic in this relationship to the degree that I continue to believe these bald-faced lies.
My brother is not the problem.
He's doing what parasites do.
And he's always going to do what parasites do until I stop enabling him.
I stop believing his lies.
I can start to actually help him, not the demon of parasitism that is currently riding his heart.
Now, this is why people stay in this blur of now, because as long as you just give the guy another 500 bucks and, you know, pretend to believe his promises, then you can clink your beer cans and you can talk about your childhoods and the game and the weather and off he goes in his way.
But the moment you say, like, you've got this accumulated anger and frustration, but every single time there's a confrontation.
Because then he's going to say, oh man, don't you believe in me?
Don't you have faith in me?
It's difficult.
You had it easier.
Mom did this for you, and I didn't get this, and then Dad got sick, and you owe me, and I helped you with this, and there's going to be this weaselly, grotesque Tentacle up the leg, grab your nutsack kind of confrontation, which is if you keep pushing through it, you're going to hit the core rage that is at the basis of all parasitism.
All the people who prey upon you through lies do so because at the bottom of those lies is volcanic, murderous rage.
And it is the rage that makes you believe in the lies.
And you question the government, you question the media, you'll see it.
You question the people around you about the degree to which their addiction to winning in the moment and losing in the long run leads them to feed the government additional compliance which only destroys the future and their society that little bit much more every single day.
The rage that is at the bottom of manipulation because manipulation is fundamentally helplessness.
And rage is right at the root of helplessness, a fundamental inability to believe that you can do something of value on your own, which necessarily leads you to water down a channel to end up trying to manipulate and parasite other people through language.
So the military-industrial complex is like a giant, soul-sucking, demonic, evil version of your deadbeat brother.
Because they're constantly, oh man, you know, just give me, I tell you what, give me 10,000 bodies.
I mean, that's all I want.
10,000 bodies, maybe a trillion and a half dollars.
Yeah, maybe three trillion over a long period.
Who cares about that?
Give me 10,000 bodies of your family, of your kin, 10,000 bodies.
That's it, man.
That's all I need.
That's all I need.
10,000 and we're done.
And there'll never, ever be anything again.
Ever.
Ever.
Oh, we'll need a million dead bodies on the other side, but, you know, they're ragheads.
What do we care, right?
So, just give me a little more.
A little more, man.
A little blood.
You know, vampires are a little hungry.
Just a little more, man.
Come on.
You already come this far.
You already gave me 260 million bodies last century.
Just 10,000 more.
That's all I need.
And then I'll never, ever come back.
Like the blackmailer, right?
Give me another 10,000 bucks and I'll never, ever show you.
I'll never ever show your wife the picture of you humping that fire hydrant.
So One more set of bodies, man.
That's all I need.
Just one more.
First World War?
Okay, not First World War.
Let's do the war against the Communists right after the First World War.
Okay, okay.
Well, let's...
That one's okay.
Let's start...
Oh, I know.
Let's do some kind of war in Spain.
Yeah, let's battle the fascists in Spain.
George Orwell can write about it.
It's going to be great.
Okay, let's, you know, let's let this war start fermenting Among the Germans and okay second world war.
That's it.
It's the war that we're all done Okay, it's 40 million dead them are old.
Okay.
Well hang on after that of course We do have Korea and we have Vietnam then we're going to destabilize a whole bunch of countries in the Middle East We're going to keep the weapons and the military in Germany and Japan pretty much forever Oh, I know what let's use a billion Muslims to fight against communism by arming them and training them the radicals on how to bring down a super power and By exploiting the asynchronous costs of attack versus defense,
and as I've talked about many times, taking down the $20 million MiG plane with a $20,000 Stinger missile, and then once we've radicalized the Muslims, and invaded, and bombed, and taken over their countries, and installed their own puppet governments, after that, I guarantee it, absolute peace forever.
And this is why Americans have to stay amnesiac, because the moment they stop forgetting or pretending to forget, well, then they have to wake up to the challenge they face.
But the longer they stay asleep, the deeper and darker the cave they awaken in.
Yeah, and they not have to acknowledge the path.
On that though, I have just one last question.
Keep it quick because I got another caller.
I'm not directly responsible for what's happened in the Middle East.
It is the US government.
But I think lots of people do feel a desire to help the refugees.
I guess my problem with the media, how it is, is that Well, no, hang on.
Okay, first of all, I'm not saying you're responsible, but there is a level of responsibility.
I've got a question, which I'm going to do a podcast on in a little bit, which is, what is a hero?
Just you tell the facts.
You speak the facts, you speak the truth.
It's the only thing that there is.
Heroism isn't like, I've got to go to study jujitsu for 12 years and then I can be a hero.
Or I've got to go join the special forces and then I can be a hero.
Heroism is available to everyone at all times in all circumstances.
Right.
Just speak the truth.
But do we have, because our government's been involved in this, I mean, from my experience, refugees, the best is for them to resettle there or find a way to be successful in sort of similar cultures.
But do we have a responsibility to help in some way, whether to sponsor a family or to go over or to donate money?
I mean, what is exactly our individual responsibility to the, would you say, to the refugees coming out of Syria?
Tell the truth about Foreign policy.
I mean, if you really want to help people, look, I mean, if you want to send money over, send money over, right?
You know, there's more than half a million homeless in the United States.
I'm sure they could use some help too.
But you need to tell the truth about what's going on over there.
See, from the outside, you know, I made this analogy about cows and farmers and so on, which is basically that The farmer keeps his cows well, and the cows are like, oh, that farmer's a great guy, but if the farmer's out hunting beyond the farm, the animals think he's a murderous sociopath, right?
But here's the thing.
People who don't have a democracy, like people in these theocracies in the Middle East, People who don't have a democracy look at Western countries and think that democracy works, and they think that the American population and the European population is A-OK with all these invasions.
Why?
Because it's a democracy, you see.
And what does the government, all the democracies around the world, they say, oh yes, well we represent the will of the people, the people voted us in.
The great danger of democracy is that those outside the democracy Feel justified in attacking the members of that democracy for what their governments do.
Because that's the story of democracy.
In a democracy, you see, in a democracy, the government reflects the will of the people.
George W. Bush and Obama both got re-elected after invading or arming insurgents within Islamic countries.
Now, the degree to which people in a democracy are propagandized or...
They don't care about that.
Maybe they don't even know about that.
But when you see people on the other side cheering those who are killing you, and knowing that they can only kill you because those other people are cheering, you probably hate the people cheering even more than the people killing you.
Does that make sense?
So when, it's not justification for any of these evil actions, but when a terrorist goes and attacks the citizens of a democracy who voted in the government that is attacking that person's country, from the outside of that democracy, it looks like there are justifications for that.
Do you see what I'm saying?
Because the democracy reflects the will of the people.
And the majority of people voted in for these horrible policies and the people aren't there protesting.
They're not out there saying, God damn it!
Stop invading these countries.
This war is an abomination.
And they vote the same leaders in.
They vote the same leaders in who've done it all already.
And anybody who says, oh, you know, we should really cut defense, we should really stop getting involved in these foreign countries, just look at the Republican debates.
Look at the Democrat debates.
They used to be a little bit more, let's stop invading other countries, but they swallowed that blood pill as effectively as everyone else.
Now, there are a few people who are saying, let's cut back.
Like Ron Paul, to his credit, Rand Paul's a bit more pro-military, but Ron Paul was very much like, let's close down the military bases and come home.
And to his credit, right?
I mean, there's a great, but the guy never polled more than a couple of percentage points.
So people look at overseas, this is what happens when you, right?
People look overseas and say, well, the only guy who's saying, let's bring the troops home, nobody cares about.
And the media hates him.
Ron Paul got, I mean, it's horrible, natural, right?
And so they look and they say, okay, well, the media must reflect what the American people think because the media have to sell.
To the American people.
The politicians, they can lie, but people have to go and buy a damn magazine or a newspaper or go to some website.
And so if the only guy in the last presidential race who was talking about what is called isolationism, right, which is, I don't know, apparently not jumping into a burning building is now called being an isolationist.
What, you don't want the burning building?
You're an isolationist.
And it's not isolated when you trade with people.
Apparently it's not isolated when you go and kill people.
But anyway, apparently that's not isolated.
But yeah, so from the overseas, they look at the American politicians who are all like, yeah, let's go bomb more brown people.
And then they look at anybody who says otherwise...
There's Noam Chomsky, who's very critical of US aggressive foreign policy.
What are his faults?
And we all have our faults, but the guy's bang on when it comes to US foreign policy, everywhere from Nicaragua to Lebanon to Iraq to Iran.
Great stuff.
Now, Noam Chomsky, is he showing up on TV? Is he making his case anywhere?
Does he get op-ed pieces in the New York Times?
No.
So they do see that there are a small minority of people who are willing to go out there.
I mean, put myself in that number, US foreign policy, Western foreign policy is god-awful.
And it certainly is true that foreign policies of all governments are pretty much god-awful.
It's just that the West is a bit better armed at the moment.
So from the outside, they say, well, They keep voting these people in, even though they know what they've done.
They keep buying the same media that lies to them, even though there's lots of information that's out there on the internet, right?
Whenever you have, in a conflict, two people living in entirely different worlds, the result is almost always violence.
Almost always violence.
So people in the West are looking at particular news sources that Just not connecting the dots for them.
And I try and do that in this show with, of course, people's help.
People, I mean, people in the Middle East, they're looking at very different news sources, right?
And those news sources are actually showing pictures of Iraqi dead people.
And they're actually talking about the genetic destruction of significant portions of the Iraqi population because of these depleted uranium weapons that are out there destroying everybody's DNA. And you can actually find out this information, and they have a memory.
There was a communist leader in China who said, what's so charming about the American population that there's no sense of history?
Well, they sure as hell have a sense of history in the Middle East.
The Middle East is pretty much defined by its history, and perhaps you could say to a slightly excessive degree, but they don't forget.
The people in Iran, they don't forget what happened in 1953.
The people in Iraq, they're not forgetting.
The people in the Sudan, the people in Egypt, the people in Egypt are remembering what the British did in the 19th century.
They don't forget.
Now, do they sit there and say, well, you know, this stuff isn't really very well taught in these schools.
They say, no, you're responsible for knowing this stuff.
It's your government.
They're acting in your name.
They're using your tax dollars.
You are responsible for at least knowing what the hell they do and not re-electing the same assholes who did it before.
And if you can't be bothered...
To find out even the first basic facts about what your government is doing overseas.
And if you can't get any kind of debate going internally in your goddamn country, if you're too cowardly, if you're too fussed with social inconvenience, well, you know what's socially inconvenient?
It's a fucking bunker buster in the gonads.
You're concerned about uncomfortable silences at Thanksgiving dinner when you bring up US foreign policy.
We're concerned about radioactive drinking water and our children's body parts splashed on the top of apple trees.
So we have to suffer this and you can't even get off your asses, go to some dissident websites from the mainstream American media, find some truth and speak some difficult facts.
Fuck you, Westerners.
You get what you deserve.
I'm not endorsing that viewpoint.
I'm just telling you that's where it's coming from.
When the cows don't understand what the animals in the woods are going through by being blown up by the farmer, by being shot at by the farmer.
And when they're cheering the farmer who's shooting all the animals in the woods, the animals in the woods are going to attack the cows until the cows understand what the animals in the woods are experiencing.
It is an attempt to communicate experience.
It's gruesome, it's bloody, it's destructive.
But the people in the Middle East are looking at entirely different information than the people in the West, as a whole, in general.
And there's no possibility of reconciling this, except through violence, until people start seeing the same information.
If the people in the Middle East saw a significant movement, a significant conversation in the West like, what the fuck are we doing out there?
What the fuck are we doing out there?
What right do we have to go and blow up these ancient civilizations?
What right do we have to go and replace governments that people are relatively content with?
What right do we have to go over there and drop bombs and to enforce rations of essential medical goods and to embargo oil and to control the waters of other people's countries?
What the hell right does America have to have over 700 military bases throughout the world?
If people around the world saw that kind of conversation happening anywhere to any significance in the West, we might see a reduction of hostilities.
In fact, we would see a reduction of hostilities.
What they're attacking is the cowardice and blindness and refusal to at least stand up and be counted.
Now, if people in the West said, we hate this foreign policy, we hate that it's being done in our name, we think it's evil, we think it's immoral, And we're never gonna vote for anyone who wants to continue doing this shit.
And let's say that the politicians didn't change a goddamn thing, then people in the Middle East would have some sympathy for the people in the West and say, well, I guess they're as captive as we are.
So we won't attack them anymore because it's not their fault.
But until Western people either change what their governments are doing or reveal that even though they're desperate to, they can't, they're gonna be associated with what their governments do.
They are.
Because there is a tacit approval And a tacit endorsement of silence and an explicit one of re-voting.
And everyone around the world is looking at the U.S. presidential debate saying, is this going to come up at all?
And what do they hear?
They hear Donald Trump saying, ah, bomb them more!
We're going to contain them, we're going to control them, we're going to surround them, we're going to bomb them, we're going to...
God knows what, right?
Nobody's ever saying...
Okay, let's go through the list.
How's this been working out for us?
I could go through that list again, but people can rewind if they want.
People around the whole world are looking to see, is this going to change peacefully?
And by bringing this information to people, I'm doing my very best to combat terrorism.
Because if terrorism is defined as the use of violence to achieve a political goal or objective, Who are the real terrorists?
And who are the real supporters of terrorism?
I will leave that for people to ponder.
Listen, I've got to get to the last caller.
I'm sorry I had such monologues, but you hit some geysers.
Okay.
Well, thanks for the conversation.
Alright, so up next is Eve Ganey.
He wrote in and said, How come every time people start building societies from scratch, the big and successful ones always end up with a government that holds monopoly on violence?
In other words, what if the only way to organize large groups of people, in a stable way, is to install a central government, with all the taxes, laws, police, etc?
Hello.
Hi.
So, first of all, I want to say that I am Russian.
You may have shown up in a few Dostoevsky novels for me.
Anyway, I just want to say that I'm not really offended by your bashing of Russians and our seemingly tendency of defrauding everything we see.
I wouldn't characterize what I said as exactly that way.
Anyway, so...
Well first of all thank you for having me on the show and I'd like to sort of expand a little bit on my question.
So I've been thinking about why can't we have a society that would be likable by a lot of people and would be free of constant conflict of desires and Capabilities of people.
So some people want a lot of things and they very often can't get those things.
And one of the possible reasons is that they can get a job that they want.
And so there's also the government that sort of acts as a sort of A side agent who doesn't participate in a productive way in the market, yet seems to sort of monopolize the control of the market.
And I came to the conclusion that I don't think it is possible for human beings to organize themselves without getting together and installing such a control agency just They just created.
So, the Roman Empire started as a free society and grew into huge bureaucratic states.
Well, with slavery and with relatively few rights for women, but all right.
Yes.
When Europeans came to America, they basically eradicated the only free societies there were, And installed.
Wait, wait, hang on.
I'm sorry.
Are we going with Native American society as a free society?
The local tribes were more like a communist dream.
I'm not talking about buy-ins and inks.
They were huge.
They have five-year industrial plans and gulags?
I don't quite understand what that means.
I'm just saying that I can't say that I extensively watch your show, but I watch many and I came to the conclusion that you're a supporter of hands-free government, so to speak, that kind of allows the free markets to evolve on their own evolution and somehow this will work out better than what we have today.
And the welfare and the education, the free education, and you're bashing Bernie Sanders for his seemingly socialist views.
And I just want to provide an opposing opinion and opposing consideration to this.
Am I right?
Just because, I mean, sorry, my positions are woefully mischaracterized, which is fine because you haven't listened to the show much.
I have to accept the non-aggression principle.
Because UPB, right?
My universally preferable behavior.
I have to accept the non-aggression principle in the same way that, you know, physicists are reasonable to accept that there's such a thing as gravity and speed of light is constant and so on, right?
And because I support the non-aggression principle and universality is the test of ethics, then no one can initiate use of force against anyone and be moral, right?
No moral theory can support the initiation of the use of force in a universal way.
And so because no one can initiate the use of force, a state, a government, is automatically an immoral agency or entity because it relies upon the initiation of the use of force.
It relies upon taxation or customs duties or the acquisition of land without the investment of labor or whatever.
So it's not like, oh, I'm not a fan of government or anything.
You know what I mean?
I'm not a fan of Ptolemy.
I guess I like the cut of I mean, I have to accept that the non-initiation of force is a reasonable and objective and valid moral concept.
And as a result, anything which violates the non-initiation of force cannot be moral.
And in fact, anything which directly relies upon the initiation of the use of force must be immoral.
This is why rape is immoral as opposed to lovemaking.
Lovemaking does not require the initiation of force.
This is why theft is immoral as opposed to charity because theft requires the initiation of force or fraud.
And the same thing with murder and the same thing with assault is the initiation of force.
If it's self-defense, that's a different matter.
And so when you say, well, you're not a fan of government or whatever, or it's like, well, you just don't like murder because you're not a fan of murder.
Like, there are principles behind it.
You can agree with them or not, but there is a reason and principled set of arguments behind it.
So I don't know what hands-off government means, but any individual or individual claims the right to initiate force and be moral are wrong.
Anyway, so I just wanted to mention that, but we can certainly go on as to why it might happen.
I think so.
I have a question for you.
What would the What would the government do if somebody does rape someone?
What do you mean, what would the government do?
Well, there's definitely going to be someone protecting people.
We know what the government does, which it tries to prosecute and jail the person for rape, right?
That's what I'm saying.
I have a question for you.
Under your principle of non-initiation of force, if someone does rape somebody or Well, first of all, it's around prevention rather than cure, right?
So a rapist doesn't just appear.
He has to be raised by a single mom in general, right?
So a rapist doesn't just appear.
A rapist is somebody who usually has experienced significant amounts of sexual violence in his childhood.
Now, Sexual violence in childhood is something that shows up physiologically in general, right?
I mean you can see trauma and the effects of child abuse can be seen in brain scans very easily.
Trauma also gives, you know, heightened fight-or-flight responses, heightened levels of cortisol in the system and so on.
So any child who would be exhibiting slightly different behavior could be easily taken to a doctor and the doctor would give a child a scan and would see the effects of trauma right away and a reasonable and free society would leap into In fact, leap into action to attempt to remediate whatever trauma or childhood abuse that the child was undergoing.
And so figuring out whether there's child abuse and what is occurring and figuring out the kinds of traumatic childhoods that lead to adult levels of aggression, sociopathy, and so on, criminality, it's all very easy to do.
It's just...
There's no agency in society that profits from that.
The average person profits from a peaceful society, but the cops profit from crime, governments profit from crime because they get to exercise power over citizens, kick in their doors.
They get to tax citizens for the illusion of protection.
They get to run all these fabulous lawyer-enriching, quote, legal systems or law courts.
They get a prison complex, which they get to buy votes with by handing out contracts and union contracts.
So, governments profit enormously from criminality.
You can't buy a fence if there's nothing dangerous around you, so the government loves the fact that there's criminals around, so the government has no incentive.
Plus, of course, children don't vote, and parents do, and parents don't...
If the parents are abusive, they don't want anyone to find out, right?
That's the reason why cat burglars don't show their faces, because they don't want to get caught.
So, in a free society, though, Everyone is privately paying for protection, and so the fewer criminals there are, the less everyone pays for there.
So, like, if you go to an insurance company now and you're a smoker, they'll charge you more for your insurance because you're more expensive to insure because you're a smoker, so you're gonna probably die sooner.
And so insurance companies are always in the business of giving people lower rates, right?
Which is why, in a free society, You don't mix up smokers with non-smokers, because the insurance companies that separate these two can offer better rates to non-smokers.
And this is why, in America, everybody wants everyone else to be forced to buy their particular risk factor.
Let me finish.
You can't charge different prices for women and for men, because women generally consume more healthcare services and men fewer, which is why women lobby governments to not allow insurance companies to discriminate between the two in terms of costs and so on.
So in a free society, insurance companies who would be protecting society from criminality and so on would pay bonuses to parents who allowed their children to get occasional scans to detect whether there was any child abuse.
As a result, child abuse would be very easily found out.
It would be remediated against.
Parents would go through particular kinds of parental education systems or whatever that would help them become better parents.
Now, if parents refused to, Well, society has the most powerful weapon of all, which is called economic and social ostracism.
If, in a society, people decide they don't like you, they don't want to have anything to do with you, then they can stop doing business with you.
Now, it's impossible to live in a city in particular if people aren't willing to supply you with electricity or food or heating or whatever it is that you need.
Water, for instance, is quite helpful if you're in a city.
So, society as a whole can simply decide to stop interacting with people who don't follow social rules.
It would be a last-ditch thing and there are certain actions that you could take to restore your reputation in society and you could get back all of your services.
So, if For instance, it was found out that you were an abusive parent towards your child.
Well, the insurance companies would step in very solidly and they would say, listen, we can't insure you.
And of course, if your kids are not insured, then it's unlikely that schools will take them or other places and so on.
And there's no private, there's no public property.
So you can't just go squat in some public park or something like that.
It's all privately owned.
And so at some point, you're going to either have to leave that society or you're going to have to say, okay, well, what do I have to do so people are willing to work with me?
Again, willing to sell me food and water and electricity and heating and come and repair my roof and deliver me the internet or whatever it is, let my cell phone work and so on.
And so there will be particular actions you would take and the insurance company would say, okay, well you go to this parenting class and we're gonna now scan your kid in two months and we're gonna expect that there's been a huge amount of improvement and we're gonna talk to your kid every Friday for 20 minutes, ask him how everything's going and so on.
And so society moves in to prevent the kind of abuse from escalating to the point where it manifests in adult criminality.
And this is just my particular idea or what seems to make sense economically.
You'd have millions and millions of people around the world all trying to figure out the best way to reduce the costs of dysfunction within society, which right now there's almost no incentive for anyone to do it.
And so that's what would happen in terms of prevention.
Now, if somebody could still be aggressive, right?
They might have a brain tumor.
They might have some physiological disability.
They might get A bump that gives a concussion that lowers their neofrontal cortex or the inhibition of their impulses.
So you could still have criminals, even if they've been raised very well.
Well, okay, so then some guy goes and rapes someone, or some woman goes and rapes someone.
Well, that woman would then be found, either found or not found.
And if they're found, then they have to...
Fix it, right?
They have to either have to give restitution, they have to submit to a certain amount of whatever re-education they would need, whatever therapy they would need.
If the guy has a brain tumor, he'd obviously go get treated for it or whatever.
If the guy had a concussion, maybe there'd be something they could do to help fix his brain or whatever.
But that person would then have to make good the wrong that they had done in some particular manner.
And if they didn't, then society would simply stop doing business with them.
And now you could say, oh, well, what if there are a few people who did want to do business with them?
Well, those people would be ostracized as well, and it really wouldn't be worth their while.
So that person would be unable to live in society...
Until they made restitution and restored their reputation within that society.
So they could go live in the woods if they wanted, go live somewhere where there's nobody, and then, you know, basically they've self-banished, which is, banishment was a, I mean, prison is a kind of banishment in that you're no longer a part of everyday society.
So if they go self-imprison by self-banishing themselves, okay, well, problem solved.
But if they want to come back into society and get trade and get benefits and get the economic benefits Participation that they need to survive within that society.
Well, then they have to take the steps to restore their reputation so that they can do that.
So these are just off the top of my head description.
There's more about this, of course, in my free books, Everyday Anarchy, and in particular Practical Anarchy, which people can get at freedomandradio.com slash free.
But these are some possibilities that have worked very well in the past.
Ostracism is a very, very powerful It's a tool within society, but it is not used at the moment because it's illegal for the most part, and also because the government is supposedly doing its thing to solve these problems.
I'm not saying this is a perfect answer and I don't want to get into what if this and what if that.
These are just possible ways of approaching it.
But I think what's more interesting is, because you can do that forever, what if the meteor hits, and what if the reputation system goes down, and what if a whole separate group of people, blah, blah, blah, right?
These are just possibilities, right?
And you can look them up and come back if you have more questions.
But what's more interesting to me is why does this, as you say, why does it happen that people say, well, we've got to have a government?
Government's got to be at the center of society.
How are we going to solve problems?
We've got to have a government.
Government's got to tell people what to do, and that's how we're going to solve problems.
I think I have an answer to that, but it means I've got to ask you some questions.
I just want to add, I'll just say, First, I want to summarize that.
So, just so that I understand correctly what you are describing, that there will be sort of a voluntary contributions to insurance companies that...
No, no, no, not voluntary contributions.
You're charged.
Yes.
Okay.
So, you have insurance companies that somehow necessitate training and kind of a follow-up on anyone who is potentially We're going to cause some disruption to the order.
There's also...
No, not disruptions to the order, who are going to be aggressive criminals.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Sounds a bit totalitarian, the way you put it.
Okay, okay.
I'm sorry.
I don't mean that as a total thought control.
But, you know, somebody showed the obvious signs of being a danger to society.
Yeah, so...
Sorry, just for instance.
So, signs of sociopathy include something like bedwetting cruelty to animals.
And arson, burning things, right?
These are signs of sociopathy.
So society would try and do something about that.
Well, one side thing.
I don't think it's worth a discussion, but I think it's sort of like a tax.
No, no, no, it's voluntary.
It's perfectly voluntary and it's openly competitive because there's not one central insurance company.
Everybody's trying to get your business.
Everybody's trying to give you the best possible rates, which means having the fewest possible criminals in society and figuring out the best way to achieve.
I have an example where it just failed spectacularly.
And one of them is firefighting.
So currently firefighting doesn't have any federal support.
Firefighting has to be completely voluntary and it has to be funded by the city or the place you're leaving.
It has to be the voluntary contributions, but there is no federally or state imposed tax to maintain firefighters.
And several cities have come up with an insurance policy that you buy a special plaque that you hang in your house and if your house is on fire and the plaque is displayed, Firefighters will come and we put down fire.
But if your neighbor's house is on fire and your neighbor didn't pay, then the firefighters will not do anything.
They will just stand there and the house will burn down and then your house will start to be on fire because they could easily put the fire down.
They could easily prevent the fire.
And they do.
No, listen, come on, come on.
Are you going to tell me that Firemen are going to go out to a fire they could easily put out and just stand there and watch it burn and spread.
Yes, it did happen.
Wait, it happened once?
No, it happened once.
It happened several times and it happened, I think, one of the last...
I gotta call bullshit on this.
I'm sorry.
I think this is an urban myth.
Mike's gonna have a look at it.
Because they'll just put the fire out and they'll charge you afterwards.
They don't do that.
The neighbors plead, please, I'll pay you everything.
No, you didn't pay.
And the reason they don't do that, because if they do that, Then people will stop paying the insurance policy and they will just wait until the fire happens.
And if it doesn't happen, they don't have to pay anything.
Alright, so let me just get the story here.
So this is from 2011.
Firefighters in Tennessee let a home burn to the ground because the owners did not pay a $75 fire subscription fee.
Firefighters stood by and watched a Tennessee house burn to the ground earlier this week because the homeowners didn't pay the annual subscription fee for a fire service.
We just wish we could have gotten more out.
So yeah, nobody was hurt.
Second time in two years.
So we've got two times in two years because people didn't pay for the fire, right?
Now, it's clear to me that they obviously can't charge you afterwards only the $75, right?
That Wouldn't make any sense, because then nobody would pay, or very few people would pay out front.
Yeah, the owners plead, I'll pay you not the same, I'll pay you like $1,500.
I'll just put the fire down.
They will just watch and stand, and they will just protect the houses nearby who paid.
Now, that's interesting to me, and I don't know the facts about this, but I wonder if they're allowed to.
Well, there is no law about the necessity...
Wait, you know that for sure?
Have you really studied this?
Because it sounds like you're just making up answers here.
Okay, so I've read a little bit of history in that, I read those articles, and there was this case, and I'm just saying that these voluntary contributions to the insurance policy, which was quite reasonable, $75, it's really not that much.
Failed spectacularly for people who decided, who just decided not to pay.
And I'm just thinking that in the free society, there will be a lot of people who decided not to pay.
And also, as a Russian, I am coming from the Russia that transitioned...
Oh, hang on, hang on.
He's fine.
First of all, he's got insurance, this guy.
So his house was paid for by insurance.
So he paid for insurance.
He just didn't pay for the firefighters insurance.
Yes.
Okay.
So I'm not sure.
And this is in a rural area.
So it wasn't like it was on some crowded city block where the fire was going to immediately spread to some other place.
The city that was next, whose firefighters brigade belonged to...
No, it says firefighters in rural Tennessee.
Yes, yes.
So it was actually, the brigade were coming from a city nearby where there's tax on citizens and the residents of that city.
So whoever lives within the city limits pays the tax.
And the firefighting is for free, quote-unquote free, but they also offer this insurance policy that if you want to, we can go out to the neighborhood, we can go out to the county and provide you with the firefighting services.
Right, right.
So he didn't pay for the firefighting service, right?
Yes.
And I wonder if, like, I don't know, but I wonder if, let's say that the firemen decide to go and do it, I wonder if their own insurance would cover them or not.
Like, let's say that a firefighter goes into this guy's house and dies, and he hadn't paid for the fee.
I wonder if the insurance company says, we're only going to cover you as firefighters if somebody has paid the fee.
Well, that's a completely different question.
No, it's not a question that speaks to motive.
It's not completely.
The question is why, right?
And are there any laws that say, are there any laws, like does the fire...
First of all, there's not a free market situation, right?
No, there was a free market situation.
Because this is government.
If you want a firefighting service, there is a convenient, competitive company that will offer you services.
No, it's a city fire department.
It's not a private fire department.
So the city is the one who told these people not to, like it's the government that told these firefighters.
I'm not sure why you're saying this is an example of the free market.
It's the government, the city government, that told the firefighters not to do it.
Yeah, it's a free market.
No, it's a government who said it.
See, here's a hint.
I know you come from Russia.
Here's a hint.
When I say government, we're not talking about the free market anymore.
You understand?
I frankly don't see the difference because that's a paid service.
What?
That's a paid service.
What?
The firefighting is a paid service.
Well, just because you pay someone doesn't mean it's the free market.
You can pay off the mafia, that doesn't mean it's the free market.
The fact that the government sends you a bill and then gives you services doesn't make it a free market.
Well then, what is not the government?
Because everybody has some sort of an interaction with the government.
What's not the government is stuff not run directly by the government, for one thing.
You know, I don't want to get all technical, but this would be one thing.
This firefighting brigade is basically independent from the city.
Okay, let me read this to you.
South Fulton's mayor said that the fire department can't let homeowners pay the fee on the spot because the only people who would be paying were those whose homes are on fire.
So here's another hint as to how it's not the free market.
When the mayor tells you something, it's not the free market.
When it's run by the city and the mayor is explaining it, that's a government...
The mayor acts more, not like a government agent here.
The mayor acts like an owner.
Okay, listen, I'm not.
I'm sorry, man.
When you say to me that the mayor is not part of a government agency or doesn't act in the capacity of a government agency, we've left reality completely.
A mayor, by definition, is somebody who's a government agent.
He hasn't been elected by the people to be the head of the fire brigade.
He's the mayor of the sea.
Okay, listen, I can't.
Life is too short.
Listen, stop, stop.
Life is too short.
No, seriously.
I don't know if it's because I had cancer and I don't mean to pull the sea bomb out on you, but I can't have a debate with you about whether the mayor is an agent of the government.
Okay, bad example.
Leave it alone.
So let's leave this behind.
Now, as far as this goes, I think in a free market it would be kind of something like this.
That what I would like...
If I had a free market fire brigade around, what I would like is I need people to pay up front, right?
Because if nobody's paying, I'm going to have to pay for the whole damn thing, which is going to be like a million dollars a year.
So people have to pay.
What I would like is I'd say, okay, if people don't pay, please put their fire out and then bill them.
And I think that's what everyone would want, for two reasons.
Number one, compassion, right?
So if someone didn't pay, it still means they get the service, they just don't get it collectively paid for by their insurance, right?
There's a historical thing.
Well, hang on, and number two, there's compassion for other people who shouldn't have their houses burned down, and there's also self-interest in that fires can spread, right?
So I think that's what people would generally want to do.
Now, there are going to be problems.
This guy's I don't think he's got a lot of money because he's now living in a trailer park even though he got insurance money.
But there are going to be people who they're going to be careless or just accidents are going to happen and they're going to need a lot of fire consumption skills.
They're going to need a lot of firefighters and they're not going to have the money to pay.
So they're going to run up a $10,000 bill fighting a fire and they've got four bucks in the bank account.
And that's a problem.
You know, what's gonna happen with that?
I'd still want their fire to be put out, but they're gonna have to spend quite a bit of time working off their money, because that's kind of the way that that stuff would happen.
But listen, when it comes to the government versus the free market, forget about this thing that happened twice in the history of America, right?
This is really not a big, important thing to focus on.
Let's focus on something else.
Was it the government fire departments that gave you smoke detectors?
Where did smoke detectors come from?
That's...
I'll give you a hint.
They did not come from the government.
Smoke detectors.
Like, was it the local police department that figured out how to put house alarms on people?
Was it the local police department that developed all of the sophisticated anti-theft technology that is on cell phones, that is on cars, that is on a wide variety of other things?
Is it the government that works very hard on cost-effective prevention for these kinds of things?
In other words, Do smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors and whatever, argon detectors that people have in their houses, these are developed by the free market and they work for prevention of fires rather than putting fires out after they burn.
All of this theft, like cell phone thefts have gone down significantly recently because, you know, there's all those thumbprint scanners and you've got encryptions and you can remotely disable your cell phone and you can track it if the GPS is on and you can find where people are and so on.
And so all of these anti-theft and theft prevention and fire prevention devices and home security systems and video cameras, CCTVs or closed-circuit television cameras in stores, these were all developed by the free market.
And they have done an enormous amount to reduce and control the amount of crime.
So I just think these saying, well, you know, there's...
There was two instances where some government-run fire department didn't put out a fire.
Therefore, we need a government.
I don't know what kind of makes that.
But what I'm talking about is instead of looking at what's obvious, which is there's a fire burning, let's look at all the houses that aren't burning because someone who left a rug too close to their fireplace, this smoke alarm went off and they put it out with a cup of water rather than requiring 20 guys to risk their lives in some five-alarm blaze.
So it's all around this kind of prevention stuff.
That's what the free market is really, really, really good at is all of the cost-effective prevention stuff.
That's what you're going to get a lot more of in a free market environment than this whatever happened with this Tennessee government fire brigade.
Well, was it the free market that got rid of smoke in Los Angeles?
Was it what?
Was it the free market that got rid of smoke in Los Angeles?
Was it the free market that It prevents pollution of the rivers and creeks and lakes.
Is it the free market that regulates the standards for water?
I don't think so.
Oh, no, you've got that entirely backwards.
Sorry.
There's a lot of good that comes from the free market, which is what consumers want.
No, no, no.
I just said something.
You can't just continue as if I didn't.
Well, I guess you can, but I'm not going to let you.
Okay.
So, and I've been through this a bunch of times before, so I'll just keep it really brief.
First of all, the free market produces the solutions that cleans the air, right?
The scrubber, and I know this because I worked in the environmental field for a long time.
The scrubbers aren't produced by the EPA, right?
The things that reduce and control pollution and clean up the air, they're not produced by the government.
I mean, the government can pass a bunch of rules and make a bunch of fines and so on.
But in general, air quality improves long before government regulations come along, like occupational health and safety regulations.
Industrial accidents were going down significantly before the government.
The government kind of comes along afterwards.
Air pollution is going down before the government usually gets involved.
That's number one.
Number two, the government actively prevents a free market solution for these kinds of things.
Because, for instance, this is going back to an example of the 19th century.
When the first smokestacks went up around London, they put all of this filthy smoke out and it destroyed all of the orchards nearby, right?
Because the apples were like black.
And so what happened was the farmers took the smoke stack operators like they took the factory owners to court and they said, listen, you've destroyed our property.
This is our farm.
We've had this farm for 200 years.
It produces X amount of dollars every year.
We invested this much in our apple trees and you've just destroyed our entire crop.
And so you need to pay us the value of our farm back.
And this was taken to court in London and a bunch of other places where this kind of...
And in England, it's the only place I know about.
I'm sure it happened elsewhere as well.
The government said, nah, too bad.
Too bad it's the price of progress.
We're not going to give you a penny.
We're not going to make the factory owners give you a penny.
Why?
Because the factory owners employed 2,000 people and the farms employed 20 people.
And so the government got a lot more tax money from the big...
And they got a lot more donations and they got...
So they were in the pocket of the big corporations and so they sided with the small apple farmers because the way that it used to work under British common law was if you pollute someone else's property you have to pay that person restitution and their legal fees.
So this happened over and over again that big new industrial concerns would get the politicians and the courts in their pocket and impose these standards on other people because The free market had worked quite well in terms of controlling pollution, if it had been allowed to, or at least this aspect of common law, had been allowed to act.
So the idea that the government just passes a law and everything gets better, it's just one of these fantasies.
I mean, huge amounts of environmental regulations under Soviet Russia, and it was about the most polluted place on the planet.
Oh, sorry, we got a bit more information about the...
The man didn't live in the city limits, and therefore they lacked jurisdiction.
To impose a fee on him for providing services after the fact.
So the government was not allowed, the government did not allow the firefighters to put out the fire.
And then somehow this gets blamed on the free market.
But sorry, you were going to say?
I was going to say that, first of all, those British farmers, they went to the court, which is a government institution, and it was the only way to a civilized resolution of this conflict.
And without the government and with the free market economy, I don't think that would have been possible.
Also, there is an example of a French company.
I just had a name.
So they were making Freon.
They're the same company that makes Teflon.
They're working Freon for refrigerators.
And then scientists discovered that Freon destroys ozone layer in the upper atmosphere.
And that's the gas that just that is responsible for depleting of ozone and they wanted the company to shut down and then the company said that there are no regulations and so they they fought in courts and they lobbied as much as they could but the regulation was passed by the French government and lots of other governments and so the company had to stop making Freon which was immensely profitable so this is the And
this is the case when the government was sort of played a central role in favorable to the people resolution of the situation.
Yeah, and this could have been handled with a boycott.
Like, I mean, let's say that the company, let's say that everyone understood that Freon was a big problem and the media likes to play up these kinds of things sometimes a little bit too much.
So people don't like Freon.
And so what they'll do is they'll say, I'm not buying if it's got Freon in it.
And so the company won't be able to sell and they'll get bad publicity and then they will lose share value and they'll sell Switch.
You don't need all of this stuff.
And look, if you're going to talk about how great the government is in terms of protecting the environment, you have to explain to me about fiat currency.
Like, you understand that all the governments virtually around the world are hugely in debt, right?
And what is debt other than consumption in the present at the expense of the future?
If you borrow $100 now, you have to spend $100 plus interest less later, right?
So when the US government has now closed, it's about $20 trillion in debt.
$8 trillion has been added since Obama got in, not only by him.
And they have like over $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
So look at that $20 trillion in debt.
That $20 trillion Is additional consumption in the here and now, which has been damaging to the environment.
So when governments borrow, they damage the environment.
Why was there so much smog in Los Angeles?
Right?
Why was there so much smog in Los Angeles?
One of the main reasons is that the government builds all the roads.
Why is America such a car-dependent culture?
Because the government borrowed all this money, didn't raise taxes to do this, the government borrowed all this money to build the interstate highway system.
And this made America very, very car-dependent.
So when you're talking about this smog, you're talking about roads built by governments, you're talking about roads not charged directly to the people by governments.
Which is another reason why there is such inefficiency when it comes to rush hour, right?
Private roads used to work on a toll system, and they used to work on a system where the busier the road was, the more you paid.
And this is the way that there's a road up in Canada called the 407, which is semi-private, I guess.
And they charge more for rush hour than off-peak hours, which means that people are willing to accept a lower salary if they can come to work at 10 o'clock rather than 9 o'clock.
Or if they come to work at 8 o'clock, they can get a lower salary because they're not in that really high use period.
So when roads in the free market are allowed to price, what happens is they raise the prices on peak hours until people start going elsewhere, like driving elsewhere or working from home and so on and thus reducing the amount of car emissions because cars sitting around all fuming out at the same time is a huge destruction on the environment.
But because governments don't charge for roads by congestion, by time of day when people want them the most, they're not spreading out the use.
And this again.
So when you look at air pollution, it's not just some magical, mystical product of pure freedom that the government has to rush in and solve.
And I'm not saying the government is solely responsible for it, but you're not even seem to have any indication.
It's like you've just read, what, left-wing environmental sites about save your government and so on.
And so...
This idea that the government needs to save us from this evil free market predation.
You know, $20 trillion in debt is significantly more than the entire GDP of America for an entire year.
And if you think about the amount of environmental damage done by current existing American consumption of resources and production of pollution, that's a whole year or two, a year and a half to two years extra of burden on the environment that governments have by borrowing.
You know, I'll take my risks with the free market when it comes to environmental protection, when you look at the amount of damage.
And let's just say, it's not even counting war, you know, quite a lot of environmental damage in places like Iraq at the moment.
And if you've got a big government at the center of your society, okay, let's say that everything's true.
Okay, you've got two houses burned down and you've got some smog in a couple of cities.
Okay.
There are still a million Iraqis still alive, and far less terrorism in the world, and far less genetically destroyed populations in Fallujah and so on.
You know, I'll take my chances.
Well, yeah, these are all valid points, and I'm thinking that the problem is not that there is a government, but I think the problem is that the government is not, these days, is not under control of people, which, what it should be, Because I think...
Compared to when?
To what?
We just said the government now is not under control of the people.
Yes.
Compared to when?
Compared to, I don't know, maybe 1950s, 1960s when the public opinion was much more valued rather than just a sort of a media hype that it is today.
You mean because the public was really keen on The war in Korea?
Or the Marshall Plan to Europe?
Or, I mean, just off the top of my head, the public was really willing to pay for things like Jim Crow and segregation?
And I'm not sure what you mean when you say that.
I mean, the governments have been in control of educating the population since the mid to late 19th century throughout almost all Western countries.
So the idea that you can have some idea of what people think about the government when the government is responsible for indoctrinating them doesn't make any sense to me.
I mean, I wouldn't blame somebody for being a communist in Russia in 1950 because that's the way they've been raised and programmed and indoctrinated.
So I don't know how people can have any kind of rational control over the government when the government is responsible for indoctrinating them for 12 years straight about how wonderful and essential and necessary the government is.
And, you know, we got a presentation called The Truth About George Washington.
Look at the Whiskey Rebellion.
1791, very shortly after the founding of America, people don't want to pay their whiskey tax.
In Tennessee, I think it was, and George Washington rides down with a bunch of soldiers and bangs the hell out of them with swords until they cough up their taxes.
The American public, in a lot of ways, didn't want slavery.
They didn't want a civil war.
600,000 Americans died.
I mean, they didn't want any of that.
It's just government forces them to do it.
I don't know that there's this fantasy time where the government was just really responsive to the people's wishes.
Government, by definition, is not what people want.
Because when people want something, the market spontaneously creates and provides it.
People want cell phones, so free market produces cell phones.
People want shoes, so free market produces shoes.
People don't want government education, which is why people have to be forced to pay for it.
The government is the complete opposite of what people want, because if people wanted it, it would spontaneously emerge out of voluntary interactions.
Yes, and what I'm saying is that out of what people want, people want Sometimes contradictory things and not always what people want is rational and beneficial to society and so there's got to be some agency that would stay on guard.
So for example, I've been...
Wait, people are irrational so we should give them a government they vote for?
Won't they vote for irrational policies from the government?
That's a big, big philosophical question.
We know people are irrational.
No, it's not.
The more irrational people are, the less we can Have a government.
The more rational people are, the less we need a government.
It's not that complicated at all.
Yes, but the problem is that we're not rational.
Everybody has a different opinion.
Everybody wants to go in a different direction.
Right, that's why you have a free market.
If you want a bicycle and I want a car, you can buy a bicycle and I can buy a car.
And if you want to walk and I want to ride a horse, you can walk and I can ride a horse.
That's the whole point is people disagree on things, which is why we're kind of a central coercive agency that they can hijack to impose their will on everyone else.
What if you want a car that is unsafe to pedestrians?
What if you want a car- Well, then your insurance company will refuse to insure you.
Well, so that the insurance company will turn into government.
Well, now you're just not making any sense.
I mean, come on.
Well, I mean, then the insurance company imposes laws and regulations on- No, no, no, no.
Insurance company does not impose laws and regulations.
Because in order to have laws, you need a police system, you need a court system, you need a prison system.
That is a lot of overhead for one insurance company to pay for.
And the moment some insurance company wants to start paying for that, they have to put up their rates 500% and everyone's going to leave them and they won't be able to have the money to pay for it.
It's only because the government has confined you in that you can't leave Because if you try to leave and go to some other place, they'll just send you back because you don't have a passport to stay.
The government has confined you and the government will take your money without your permission against your will by definition, right?
It's charity if it's voluntary, it's taxation if it's coercive.
So that's not what an insurance company does.
An insurance company sends me a flyer in the mail.
The government sends me a bill I have to pay or they shoot me if I don't Go with them peacefully when they come to take me away.
It's a little bit of a different interaction.
Maybe you've got a more aggressive insurance company.
I don't know.
Well, I just don't...
The problem comes to that.
I don't buy into the idea that insurance companies will be so peaceful and just send you the flyer.
Well, just think of that.
Just think of being an insurance company.
Think of being an insurance company and executive.
Yeah, one thing...
The people who are insured will pay the money that they promised me to pay and that there will be a way to punish them if they don't pay.
And if the only thing available to me is ostracism, then I run into a lot of problems.
One of them is that the information doesn't spread immediately and this person can just get up and leave and go to another place and There's no problem with just...
What do you mean?
Go to another place, what, where there's no internet?
Where there's no cell phone technology?
Where there's no...
I mean, you can get a credit report in the country for just about anyone who's ever taken out a loan, and you're saying that somehow the free market in the future can't have a reputation report go from one place to another?
Are you kidding?
Do you do credit reports on every person you meet?
Do you do credit reports on every entity or business you decide to...
Interact with?
I'm not sure.
When you want to buy a computer, do you do any research or do you just walk into a store blindfolded and just grab the first thing you find and hope it's not a clerk?
A lot of people do that.
A lot of people don't want to do any research.
They go to the store and they just hope the representative of the store will help them to choose the right one.
Okay, so they do some research by asking the person in the store.
Yeah, but for example, there are, say, thieves in those stores, and no store has a complete lease.
There are what in those?
Sorry, did you say thieves?
Yeah.
Yeah, so for example, there's a guy...
You mean shoplifters?
Yes.
Okay, there are shoplifters in the store.
Okay, go ahead.
So, you as a store manager would not have a list of...
Of all the photographs and pictures of all the shoplifters that appeared in all other stores in the country.
Okay.
Is this why I can't have my freedom because there are shoplifters someplace in the world?
Is this why 50% of my money has to be taken in order to sell off my child's future to foreign bankers?
Is this why I have war?
Is this why I have massive national debt?
Is this why I have a terrible educational system because people don't have pictures of shoplifters?
Are you kidding me?
Is this why you're telling me I can't have a free life?
Well, the problem is that you will never have your free life.
I mean...
Well, not if you have anything to do with it.
I agree with you.
But come on, at the point where you're getting where you're saying, well, you don't have pictures of all the shoplifters in the world.
If this doesn't bother you, that you might be on somewhat shaky ground.
Then I don't even know what to say to you.
If you've gone this far in fighting back against some rational solutions, I don't even know.
I don't know what to say.
You make it as easy as possible.
There's Yelp.
There is the Better Business Bureau.
People put their signs on stores.
They say, We're the member of the Better Business Bureau and we've got this stamp of approval and the good housekeeping seal of approval and Consumers Report ranked us number one and we were number one in PC Magazine and we've got the best independent survey of our customer satisfaction in the business.
You know whether you're going to go to a nice hotel or a not nice hotel.
For the most part, there are rating systems all over the place.
And you're saying, I can't have a free society even though there's six million different ways in which people validate.
My God, just go and apply for a car loan or a mortgage and they'll look it up.
I don't look up the credit rating of everyone because I don't care about the credit rating of the store.
I mean, because I'm gonna go in there and I'm gonna buy something or I'm not gonna buy something And if the store closes down tomorrow, it's like, well, that's a shame, right?
But that's never happened to me in my life ever once.
I'm willing to take that chance.
And that's what you have to ask yourself when it comes to, do you want a free society?
Yeah, you can think up situations where someone's going to get the short end of the stick.
You can always think up situations where there's going to be some kind of problem.
So what?
Who cares?
We'll take our chances because what we've got right now is...
An increasingly tyrannical, overarching, oligarchical, bad decision making, single mother fostering, welfare dependence creating, military industrial complex promoting causes and problems and challenges and sticking their nose in the hornet's nest of radicals all over the world and we've got terrible...
We've got public schools, we've got crumbling infrastructure, we've got unfunded liabilities that dwarf even the national product of most countries.
I'll take my chances with shoplifters.
I can live with that level of risk.
I cannot condone the problems that we have right now.
Well, so, let me just share the lightest anecdote of my life.
So, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed.
And the country was taken over by Gorbachev at the moment, who took the course onto the free market.
And what happened is, in the lack of regulation, in the lack of government intervention in many aspects of life, crime rate soared.
Even though it was really hard to get a gun in the Soviet Union, it was really hard to get a gun in Russia, Yet, the weakness of the government was immediately viewed as an opportunity to a quite large criminal world in the Soviet Union that was kept at bay.
But once government fell and became weaker, these criminal elements took over so many parts of life in Russia.
And it is still rampant.
You can see the President Putin, although he is probably a lot better than what could have happened in Russia if somebody else took power.
But right now, he is sort of like a mafia leader among them.
So, people like Khodorkovsky, Basically killed his way to economical success were possible in post-Soviet Russia because of lack of government intervention, that the government control was so weak, the police was so weak.
Yes, they kept the petty crime more or less in control, but the large organized crime was completely unchecked.
Well, hang on, hang on.
Okay, look, I mean, with all due respect and sympathy to post-Soviet Russia, you know there were gulags, right?
Concentration camps.
They weren't at the time I lived, so this was in...
Well, you know that for sure?
You know that for 100% sure that there weren't any gulags in Russia in the 80s?
Yeah, there were no gulags in Russia in the 80s.
Were there any unjust imprisonments in Russia under the communist dictatorship?
Not.
There were people who were criticized for the anti-ideological views Yes, I agree.
That wasn't really a good thing.
Because it seems to me that under communism as a whole, it's all crime.
The entire government is crime.
And certainly if we look under Stalin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev, there was a lot of bad stuff going on in Russia.
And not to mention the fact that it had dominated and dictated over Eastern Europe, of course, and Lech Walesa and the Solidarity Movement and so on.
There's some pretty brutal stuff going there.
And so there was a lot of crime under communism.
It was just called government policy.
So I don't want to think that I can't support the notion that under the communist dictatorship, everything was great.
Forced labor camps continued to function in Russia until the late 1980s, for God's sakes.
You can't pretend that there was some no criminality just because it was legal under the communist dictatorship.
The economic freedom index in Russia is 52.1 out of 100.
It is not an economically free place.
Hong Kong is 89.6, Canada is 79.1.
I think Canada just went a little bit higher than America.
I'm arguing that the Soviet Russia was a good thing.
I'm arguing that the government...
And so they went from a communist dictatorship to a fascistic Capitalism, crony capitalism mess which they're still in.
I don't see how this is an argument against the free market because it would seem to me that they went from an economic freedom index of pretty much zero to where they're at now 50 or whatever.
And the labor camps ended, the rationing to some degree ended.
And then, sooner or later, some of the Eastern European countries no longer had the Soviet boot on their neck.
There was, of course, some flourishing of economic activity.
There were some people who made some money.
Of course, yeah, there was increased criminality because the whole country had just had 70 years of a dictatorship.
You don't immediately just switch around and just become like, wow, it's like we've come out of the European tradition of hundreds of years of developing free market institutions.
The Soviet Union collapsed and the criminal enterprise of the Soviet government ended and everybody there was traumatized from 70 years of communist dictatorship and terror and gulags and repression and authoritarianism and boots through the head in the middle of the night.
So the idea that somehow out of this you're going to get some free market paradise makes no sense at all.
Of course, the fact that it achieved any freedom at all is kind of a miracle and a testament to the resilience of the Russian spirit.
It takes a long time to develop these institutions, to develop these thought patterns, to develop these understandings.
I mean, just because a church collapses doesn't mean that everyone immediately becomes a philosophical atheist.
It just means the church has collapsed and people are digging their way out of the rubble.
And the Soviet Union collapsed.
That doesn't mean that everybody in the Soviet Union suddenly became some enlightened free marketer who really understood the ethics and philosophy behind it.
It turned into another kind of predator Robert Barron situation, arguably significantly better, at least for Eastern Europe, than the previous regime.
But I'm not taking any blame for the free market for all of this as a whole.
I mean, it's got nothing to do with it.
I mean...
I don't know what else to say.
I mean, I don't agree with what happened in Russia before or after the fall, but the idea that this is somehow a big problem because of the free market...
I'm saying that this happened because of the reduced role Okay, well I guess you and I will have to disagree on the degree to which the people stuck in the forced labor camps and the people who were stuck under the Soviet regime appreciated some of the shrinking in the size and power of the state.
I guess you prefer that the Soviet dictatorship had continued.
I think that any crack I'm sorry, I'm just not going to be polite after this, so...
I do appreciate the call.
Thanks, everyone, so much for calling in.
As always, a great pleasure to chat with you all.
The challenge and excitement of it keeps me stimulated and keeps my brain cells prickling and thudding like fireworks inside my head.
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Yeah, okay.
Not a three-point landing, but we can walk away from it.
